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Ruth King

When the Giving Tree Stops Giving by Linda Goudsmit

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21390/when-the-giving-tree-stops-giving: http://goudsmit.pundicity.com

http://lindagoudsmit.com

The United States of America emerged from World War II as the world’s undisputed superpower economically and militarily. The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative to aid Western Europe that gave over $13 billion (nearly $110 billion in 2016 US dollars) in economic assistance to help rebuild Western European communities after the end of the war. The Marshall Plan provided political stability for the world and created a world market for American good.

United States Secretary of State George Marshall delivered an explanatory speech to the graduating class of Harvard on June 5, 1947:

“The modern system of the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down. … Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health to the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is not directed against any country, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Any government that is willing to assist in recovery will find full co-operation on the part of the USA. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”

Eleven Killed in Nicaragua as Government Targets Opposition Strongholds Nearly three months of protests have killed roughly 300 people, mostly unarmed protesters By Robbie Whelan and David Luhnow

https://www.wsj.com/articles/eleven-killed-in-nicaragua-as-government-targets-opposition-strongholds-1531699706

MEXICO CITY—Nicaragua’s embattled President Daniel Ortega moved to tighten his grip on power, as paramilitary forces loyal to his government attacked antigovernment protesters at several key points over the weekend, killing an estimated 11 people.

Three students were killed after clashes at Managua’s main university campus. Meanwhile, as many as eight people died on Sunday as masked gunmen attacked opposition barricades in two provinces, according to the Nicaragua Human Rights Association, a local human-rights group that has been tracking violence during three months of opposition protests.

Among the dead was a 10-year-old girl, the group said.

“It was butchery,” said Alvaro Leiva, the group’s spokesman, describing how armed groups believed to be linked to the government descended on several towns. Many of the men wore black ski masks and some wore military-style fatigues.

The actions appear aimed at clearing out opposition strongholds after nearly three months of protests that have killed roughly 300 people, mostly unarmed protesters.

Mr. Ortega’s government has described the protests as an undemocratic effort to dislodge him from power before his term ends in 2022. He has been in power since 2007, having previously been in power during the 1980s.

At least 25 have died since Tuesday, as police, working in coordination with armed gangs, attacked barricades set up by protesters on the sprawling campus of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua in Managua and elsewhere in the country, according to local news reports, human-rights groups and Catholic church leaders.

On Friday, two students were killed and 15 badly injured in a coordinated attack on the university, sending students fleeing to a nearby church, where another student died. CONTINUE AT SITE

What the Yale Law School Freakout Says About the Opposition to Kavanaugh Andrew Ferguson

https://www.weeklystandard.com/andrew-ferguson/supreme-court-on-cue-yale-law-school-students-freak-out-about-kavanaugh?mod=article_inline

When President Trump announced last Monday that he had chosen Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy, his little speech rang out like a starter pistol. Instantly every activist, party hack, and ideological mainchancer bolted from the blocks, issuing petitions and press releases and formal statements with astonishing speed and at maximum volume. This includes Kavanaugh’s alma mater, Yale Law School, and a contingent of his fellow Yalies.

It took only an hour after Trump’s announcement for the law school’s flacks to announce the news that Trump had chosen one of their own: “President Donald Trump today nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh ’90 . . .” etc., etc. The rest of the school’s press release was a series of testimonials from acquaintances about Kavanaugh’s overall magnificence. One professor called him “a terrific judge.” Another said that “Kavanaugh commands wide and deep respect among scholars, lawyers, judges, and justices.” A man with the impressive job title “John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence” summed up: “We are proud that he is our graduate.”

We? Speak for yourself, Herr Professor. By the next day a collection of not-proud and indeed horrified Yalies had posted a rebuttal to the school’s press release, with the title “Open Letter from Yale Law Students, Alumni, and Educators Regarding Brett Kavanaugh.” They were, they wrote, “ashamed of our alma mater.”

The letter, which is twice as long as the press release, is a masterpiece of pure scold. The signers criticize the “press release’s focus on the nominee’s professionalism, pedigree, and service to Yale Law School.” What the hell, they ask, do professionalism and pedigree have to do with anything? Especially when “the true stakes of his nomination” are so high? Kavanaugh’s nomination is an “emergency,” they tell us, and the school’s implicit embrace of him raises a “disturbing question: Is there nothing more important to Yale Law School than its proximity to power and prestige?”

Disturbing or not, it’s the kind of question that answers itself. And the answer is no sir, there is not—absolutely nothing whatsoever. The reason Yale Law School exists is to convey its “students, alumni, and educators” as close as possible to power and prestige. You can’t charge $255,000 for a law degree unless you throw in a healthy portion of P&P. This is why all those people who signed the open letter went to Yale and not to Oklahoma City School of Law. Nothing against OKC. I’m sure it’s terrific.

OUT OF TOWN UNTIL MONDAY

By the sea…
With the fishies splashing
By the sea
Wouldn’t that be smashing
Down by the sea ……Stephen Sondheim

I will be out of town at the seashore this weekend….
Back on Monday morning…..rsk

JEAN VERCORS: WHERE ARE THE SAMSON AND DAVID OF OUR GOVERNMENT?

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

He writes:

When I was a little child, I was fascinated by kites. Seeing the kites dancing with the wind with colorful structures in the blue sky was magical. I remember running in all directions on the sand trying to fly my kite like a butterfly, a bird, a happy heart. Like all the children of the world I played with kites on beaches.

Kites are normally children’s toys. Except in Gaza, where the population uses the kite as a weapon of terror against the Israeli civilian population.

For more than three months, hundreds of terror kites and incendiary balloons have been launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel, causing considerable fires and threatening the civilian population in southern Israel (where I live).

Reports indicate that thousands of dunams of crops and plants have been destroyed because of this form of terrorism: agricultural terror.

Since the beginning of Palestinian violence and attempts of incursions into Israeli territory, the damage to flora, crops and wildlife has been considerable, with estimates that losses amount to several millions dollars.

According to a JNS report, “officials of the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority have estimated that at least a third of the Carmia Nature Reserve has been destroyed, with significant damage to local plants and wildlife”.

Because Israel has the advanced technologies needed to fight terror kites and incendiary balloons.

It would only take a few hours for the IDF to completely raze Gaza and put an end to this problem.

Except that this problem is not technological, but purely political.

Indeed, to combat these terrorist incursions into Israeli territory, the IDF uses barely 1% of its military power.

David Singer: PLO-Hamas anti-England, anti-Israel Hatred Politicises FIFA World Cup

Hatred against Britain and Israel surfaced in Gaza as England progressed its way through the World Cup to meet Sweden in the quarter finals.

One Gaza fan was outspoken:

“Of course I will support Sweden.

I can’t imagine a Palestinian supporting England, which created the Balfour Declaration, or not supporting the country that stood before the world and recognized our state.”

The 1917 Balfour Declaration has never been forgotten or forgiven by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Hamas – both of whom consider the Declaration to be null and void – spending decades in spruiking this false message to their respective constituencies – fomenting Arab hatred against the Jews since the Declaration first called for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

The fuming Gaza fan was expressing his resentment by barracking for Sweden – even though Sweden was one of the 51 countries that transformed the Balfour Declaration into binding international law by unanimously incorporating it in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922.

Our anguished fan was blissfully unaware of these facts having obviously not studied the 100 years old Arab-Jewish conflict. Anti-England prejudice was enough to back his decision to go for Sweden. True – Sweden had purged itself of its 1922 decision when officially recognizing the State of Palestine in October 2014 – making it the first major European Union member state to back the PLO’s statehood bid.

However in atoning for its 1922 sin, Sweden’s recognition of the “State of Palestine” was a fiction that failed to meet the requirements demanded in international law by Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention which states:

“The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications:

a. A permanent population

b. A defined territory

c. Government

d. Capacity to enter into relations with the other states

FIFA’s admission of the Palestinian Football Federation as a member of FIFA in 1988 had also contravened Article 10.1 of FIFA’s then governing articles:

‘Any Association which is responsible for organising and supervising football in its country may become a Member of FIFA. In this context, the expression “country” shall refer to an independent state recognised by the international Community.’

FIFA started living in its own dream world 26 years before Sweden joined it. Who will replace Sweden as Britain’s nemesis was summed up by another fan:

The Relentless Radicalization of Sweden by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12693/sweden-radicalization-muslims

Swedish police report that Muslim children have told their classmates they will cut their throats, while showing them beheadings on their mobile phones, according to the new study of Salafism in Sweden by the Swedish Defence University.

“Many women live worse [lives] here than they would have in their former countries” — Swedish care worker.

The inability — willful blindness is probably a more apt description — to see that jihadist terrorism does not emerge from a vacuum, but is nurtured in particular environments, is hardly an exclusively Swedish situation. The insistence of so many European and other Western authorities on describing terrorist attacks as instances of “mental illness” illustrate it perfectly.

A new study[1] of Salafism in Sweden, conducted by the Swedish Defence University, paints a bleak picture of the ongoing radicalization of Muslims in Sweden.

The Salaf are the “pious ancestors” during the first three generations of the followers of Mohammed; its ideology has come to be associated over the last few decades with al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as with local al-Qaeda affiliates. According to the study, Salafists, who believe in Islam as Mohammed’s early followers practiced it, tend to reject Western society in favor of a “pure” Islam: “Not all Salafists are jihadists, but all jihadists are Salafists”. [2]

Although the study does not give an estimate of how many Salafists are in Sweden, it does describe how Salafist milieus there have evolved and grown stronger, especially during the past decade, and lists several examples of the influence they wield in different Swedish cities and localities.

Affirmative Action on the Ropes? A lawsuit against Harvard threatens to expose what “diversity” really means. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270679/affirmative-action-ropes-bruce-thornton

A case is currently under litigation that however it is decided, will likely reach the Supreme Court. There the diversity industry may face a challenge that brings the institutional racism of affirmative action and its baleful effects to an end.

In 2014, an organization called Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard University for excluding Asian students who were far better qualified than other applicants who had been admitted. Last November the Justice Department opened an investigation into Harvard’s admission practices, and is threatening to sue the university, throwing its support behind the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs have viewed admission records through discovery, and want them publicized because the evidence for arbitrary and discriminatory evaluations is so obvious no trial is necessary. More recently, the Trump administration has rescinded Obama’s 2011 rule advising universities to use race as a criterion in admissions. Finally, the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy creates an opening for a Constitutionalist judge who will not, as Kennedy has serially done, subordinate the law to politics or social engineering.

Such portents are heartening, for race-based policies of the last forty years have rested on a preposterous justification on the basis of “diversity,” the “compelling state interest” used to violate principle and law. Indeed, the word recurs like a mantra in Supreme Court decisions. In the 2016 Fisher vs. University of Texas case, for example, Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion wrote, “It remains an enduring challenge to our nation’s education system to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity.”

Black Slaves, Muslim Masters An appeal to American blacks. Charles Jacobs (VIDEO)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270715/black-slaves-muslim-masters-charles-jacobs

Arabs and Muslims have black slaves today and hardly anyone, especially the leftist class which preens about its devotion to human rights, is screaming about this. In five African nations — Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Sudan — blacks serve Arab/Muslim masters. They are bought and sold like furniture. They are worked until they drop, tortured, raped, forcibly converted to Islam, and murdered. This has been going on for many years, but it only occasionally makes today’s headlines.

This is an open secret. Anyone can Google “blacks sold as slaves in Libya” and see video of slave markets. I know Africans from Sudan and Nigeria and Mauritania who want to tell this story but they cannot get platforms. Below is a short clip of the testimony of an escaped slave from Sudan, Francis Bok. Here is his incredible story told in long form. I have decided to help these people tell their story. The people who need to hear it most are American blacks. Please support our effort by contacting us at Americans for Peace and Tolerance.

Dear Students For Victory–er, Justice–In Palestine by Gerald A. Honigman

What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy G_d ? … Micah 6:8

Justice, Justice, shalt thou pursue… Deuteronomy 16:20

But the stranger that dwells with you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God… Leviticus 19:34
Dear SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine:

While you are receiving this correspondence yourselves, I hope you don’t mind that it will be shared with many others as well. So let me begin…

Let’s be honest. That begins with the very name of your organization.

It’s not “justice” you seek, but victory.

Students For Victory In Palestine better characterizes your raison d’etre–along with others aligned with you.

The opening quotes are from the Hebrew Bible, written some twenty-six centuries ago in the land you claim Jews have no ties to. It was called Israel and later, by Greeks and Romans, Iudaea–Judaea. Not until Hadrian ended the costlysecond major revolt of the Jews for freedom in 135 C.E. was the land renamedSyria Palaestina–Palestine–with hopes to end the Jews’ struggle once and for all.

Judaea (as in land of the Judaeans–Jews) was thus renamed for the Hebrews’ historic enemies, the “Sea People” from Crete–non-Semitic, let alone non-Arab, Philistines. Open http://q4j-middle-east.com to see a Judaea Capta coin Rome issued after the first major revolt. Judaea Capta–not Palaestina Capta. Tacitus, Pliny, Dio Cassius, and Josephus were just some of the ancient Roman-sponsored historians who recorded these events.

Those quotes are just some examples of the subject of justice found in the sacred writings of the Jews. And they go far in explaining the difference between the Arab (for example, “Palestinian”) and Jewish approaches to this concept…especially with regards to others.

In reality, there can’t be justice in any conflict unless the needs and legitimate aspirations of all parties are taken into consideration. But, again, justice is not what SJP seeks. The so-called “justice” demanded is for Arabs only. Forget about “the other” in this vision…