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Ruth King

Amnesty, morally corrupted? Hal G.P. Colebatch

https://www.spectator.com.au/2018/05/amnesty-morally-corrupted/

When Amnesty International concerned itself with campaigning on behalf of individual and identifiable political prisoners of regimes of whatever political colour it did some real good.

However, it now appears to have become an expensive exercise in wholesale and futile virtue-signalling, with some highly dubious choices of targets. If it is still campaigning for individual prisoners, one doesn’t hear much of this.

Kate Allen, UK Director of Amnesty International (the world’s third-biggest Amnesty Organisation), would-be Labour politician and long-time former mistress of extreme leftist and anti-Israel activist Ken Livingstone, appears to have had much to do with radical changes in Amnesty’s policies and political colour in Britain. Acccording to Wikipedia, ‘Allen undertook a major restructure.’

She was quoted in the International Express of May 7 on planned demonstrations at President Trump’s proposed British visit: ‘We and thousands of our supporters will very definitely be making our voices heard. In the 15 months of his presidency we’ve seen a deeply disturbing human rights rollback.’

Huh? I do not believe there is one single instance of ‘human rights rollback’ that can be blamed on Trump. His attempted crackdown on illegal immigration has nothing whatever to do with human rights, but with stopping the law of a democratic nation being flouted and damage being done with impunity to its polity, economy and identity. The accusation is not only false but will achieve nothing good. Amnesty, in Britain at least, appears to have gone from being a respected and effective defender of persecuted individuals to being just another bunch of virtue-signalling creeps.

In the European Appeasement Olympics, Who Wins? by Bruce Bawer

The difference [between what Tommy Robinson did and any reporter] is that the BBC and other mainstream media are determined to give as little coverage as possible to the mass Muslim rape of infidel girls.

These same cops arrested Tommy Robinson on Friday not because he did anything wrong, but because he was drawing attention to Muslim crimes that they would rather see ignored – and drawing attention, too, by extension, to their own genuinely criminal failure to defend innocent children from what was essentially jihadist torture.

Within hours, according to some sources, Robinson was tried and sentenced to thirteen months in prison. Even in Islam-appeasing Britain, this seems inconceivable. It sounds like Soviet or Nazi “justice,” not like British jurisprudence.

However Tommy Robinson may have strayed from the straight and narrow over the years, he is a champion of those victimized children, a voice for freedom, and a living rebuke to the cowardice of the British media, police, social workers, and other officials and public figures who knew what was going on in flats in Rotherham, Newcastle, and elsewhere, but stayed silent.

All right, the competition is over. Britain wins.

A sneak peek at ‘The Ideological War Against the West’ A new documentary wrestles with some of today’s toughest issues regarding free speech, the state of democracy, the debate on college campuses and more.By Deborah Fineblum

For more about the film or to order a DVD, visit www.thefightofourlives.com.
https://www.jns.org/a-sneak-peek-at-the-ideological-war-against-the-west

Buy a box of popcorn, find a seat, and then sit back and let your mind relax into Entertainment Land, where you forget about this troubled world for an hour or two.

If that’s your idea of a perfect night at the movies, you’ll probably wish to skip “The Fight of Our Lives: Defeating the Ideological War Against the West.”

But if it’s a different kind of experience you want—one that challenges your comfort zone—you might want to check out this latest release from Doc Emet Productions. That’s what 250 folks who gathered last week at a Boston-area movie theater for the film’s New England premier did.

This was the 14th screening in a series of theaters, community centers, synagogues, churches, museums and universities across the United States, Canada and Israel, for the production company’s fourth documentary wrestling with some of today’s toughest issues. Producer/director Gloria Z. Greenfield set the tone of the evening with this Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “Our lives begin to end the day we remain silent about the things that matter.”

MEDIA, INCLUDING BREITBART FORCED TO TAKE DOWN STORIES ABOUT TOMMY ROBINSON’S ARREST IN ENGLAND

Breitbart, The Mirror, Russia Today (RT), Birmingham Live, etc., forced to take down stories on Tommy.
According to UK independent reporter Caolan Robertson, Robinson was arrested outside the Leeds Crown Court on Friday morning as he was covering the trial of ten men (Muslims) for offenses including child rape, trafficking, and supply of Class A drugs to children.

Robinson was on video telling the arresting officers that “this is free speech. This is where we’re at.”
(Much more. Go to Nick Monroe’s Twitter feed before it is taken down, or, better yet, screen copy ASAP)! Janet Levy, Helsinki

Nick Monroe@nickmon1112
UPDATE: Breitbart forced to take down story about Tommy Robinson’s arrest.

Luckily archives are forever. Here’s the story if you haven’t seen it yet.http://archive.is/nC2ev pic.twitter.com/WpZgnD3MkN

S.Korea says N.Korea’s Kim reaffirms commitment to summit with Trump

SEOUL, May 27 (Reuters) – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un reaffirmed his commitment to “complete” denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and to a planned meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Sunday.

Moon and Kim agreed at a surprise second meeting on Saturday that a possible North Korea-U.S. summit, currently planned for June 12 in Singapore, must be held successfully, Moon told a news conference in Seoul.Moon, who returned to Seoul on Thursday morning after meeting Trump in Washington in a bid to keep the high-stakes U.S.-North Korea summit on track, said he delivered Trump’s “firm will” to end the hostile relationship with North Korea and pursue bilateral economic cooperation. (Reporting by Soyoung Kim and Hyonhee Shin in SEOUL Editing by Paul Tait)

Canada: A “Different” Kind of Antisemitism? by Philip Carl Salzman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12339/canada-antisemitism

Philip Carl Salzman is Professor of Anthropology at McGill University, Senior Fellow of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, and Fellow of the Middle East Forum.

“I have a confession to make. If you are Jewish… I used to hate you. I hated you because I thought you were responsible for the [Somali civil] war which took my father from me for so long… When we had no water, I thought you closed the tap. … If my mother was unkind to me, I knew you were definitely behind it. If and when I failed an exam, I knew it was your fault. You are by nature evil, you had evil powers and you used them to evil ends. Learning to hate you was easy. Unlearning it was difficult.” — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, quoted in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, by Andrew G. Bostom.

In Canada, Wael al-Ghitawi, the imam of Al-Andalous Islamic Centre, and Sayed al-Ghitawi “both called for the death of Jews. The sermons came to public attention in February 2017, when YouTube videos of the talks were translated into English.”

Let us be frank: as is all too clear from the recent European experience, importing large numbers of Muslims means importing Islamic antisemitism. Hate crimes against Canadian Jews are already on an upward trajectory. Is it the Canadian Government’s policy to encourage an increase in antisemitic hate crimes?

In Berlin, on evening of the May 17, 2018, two men wearing Jewish skull caps were attacked by three Arabic speaking men, who repeatedly cursed at them and called them “yahudi,” Jew, in Arabic. One of the Arabs knifed one of the men, Adam Armoush, with his belt. The attack was recorded, and the video widely seen.

Ironically, Adam is not a Jew. He is an Israeli Arab, who was wearing the skull cap to test whether it was unsafe to show oneself as a Jew in Berlin. He was skeptical; he has now reconsidered.

One of the assailants, a 19 year old refugee, claiming he was from Syria, later turned himself into the police.

Political Correctness at Stanford Law By Martin J. Salvucci

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/stanford-law-school-political-correctness-intolerance-conservative-views/here’s a growing intolerance of conservative views.

Nestled in the heart of what is now Silicon Valley, the Leland Stanford Junior University was, for much of its hundred-plus-year history, lightly regarded as a playground for the idle rich. To the extent that Stanford bore any resemblance to its aspirational cousins on the East Coast, it was to their previous incarnations as polite finishing schools for those who made their money the old-fashioned way — that is, by inheriting it.

All of this began to change during the 1960s with the advent of the modern semiconductor industry. Although this development was largely a fortuitous coincidence, some combination of luck and shrewd decision-making soon tied Stanford’s fortunes to the trajectory of its now-prosperous environs. The results, of course, are nothing short of breathtaking. The undergraduate college regularly boasts the nation’s lowest acceptance rates, and both the graduate business school and the law school likewise rank at the very top of their respective fields.

But all is not well on a campus where many T-shirts bear Stanford’s unofficial mantra that “Life Is Good!” Last year, former provost John Etchemendy warned publicly of a threat from within — a “growing intolerance” that has manifested as a sort of “political one-sidedness.” His admonition was, predictably, politely ignored. However, my experience at Stanford Law School suggests that, if anything, Etchemendy has understated the scope and the scale of the challenge that elite universities now face.

At Stanford Law School, no more than three of approximately 110 full-time faculty publicly identify as conservative or libertarian. (By way of contrast, Stanford Law School touts on its webpage 23 full-time faculty under the inartful rubric of “minority.”) As a consequence, many of my classmates will graduate having never engaged with a law professor whose worldview and convictions track those of nearly half the voting public.

A Marine Gets His Medals In Scranton, a Memorial Day lesson from the Vietnam War.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-marine-gets-his-medals-1527287941

‘A nice town, with good people” is how Lance Corporal Jimmy Reddington described his Pennsylvania hometown of Scranton to a fellow Marine who shared a foxhole in Vietnam, according to a story in the local Times-Tribune. Within three months of deploying to Vietnam, Reddington was killed in action. Fifty-one years later, in time for Memorial Day, this Marine will finally get the 12 medals he earned there, including two Purple Hearts.

The Marine with Reddington was Joe Silvestri, who was wounded but survived the same battle that took his friend’s life. Since discovering Reddington’s grave in 1994 in Scranton’s Cathedral Cemetery, Mr. Silvestri has been coming back, along with other Marines, to tend the grave and pay respects to their brother-in-arms.

The medals make this year’s commemoration a little more special. Because Reddington’s father died when he was young and his mother and sister have since died too, the medals will be presented to the local Marine Corps League. They will be presented by retired Lieutenant General Ron Christmas, a Marine legend for his actions in Hue, one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. Marines from Reddington’s Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines will also be on hand—some old now, some in wheelchairs, but all determined to see that one of their own gets his due.

There are Jimmy Reddingtons all around us. They wear different uniforms—Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard—but they have in common a way of life that elevates service to country. Amid the cookouts, parades and flags that mark the last weekend in May, the stories of the men and women who didn’t live to make the trip home will rightly be told at thousands of Memorial Day celebrations in little towns and big cities across the United States.

Fifty-one years is a long time to wait for recognition. But the people of Scranton know it is never too late for the living to show our gratitude for the sacrifices that make America’s freedom possible.

The Open Secret of the FBI’s Investigation of Trump’s Campaign By Julie Kelly

For the past several days, the American public has been treated to quite a spectacle. Since President Trump first suggested in March 2017 that his campaign had been “wiretapped” by President Obama, we have been assured by our betters across the political spectrum that claim was not true and Trump’s accusations were the unhinged hallucinations of a mad man.

But as congressional investigators get closer to the truth, and the media begins casually to admit that yes, Obama (i.e., his Justice Department) did wiretap (i.e., surveil) the campaign (i.e., Trump Tower) as well as one member of his transition team, we are getting a shiny new spin: Well of course the Obama folks investigated the Trump campaign and of course it was not conducted by spies and of course this was all for the good of the country and of course it is Trump’s fault anyway.

The most mendacious tale now emerging from the news media, Democratic propagandists, and the NeverTrump Right is how the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign just months before Election Day actually helped Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton. Why? Because voters allegedly were unaware that Trump campaign associates were being “investigated” by the FBI for their tenuous ties to Russia; if we had known before November 8, 2016, Hillary would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

The latest dream sequence from #TheResistance originates from the May 16 scoop in the New York Times about President Obama’s FBI initiated probe called “Crossfire Hurricane” which was tasked to investigate four Trump campaign aides exactly 100 days before the presidential election. The general angle of the lengthy story is how former FBI Director James Comey was far tougher on the Clinton email probe and more cautious about the Trump campaign investigation. (Pause to chortle.)

The Times story appears to serve two purposes: First, to soften the blow of the upcoming Justice Department inspector general’s report on the Clinton email investigation, which is expected to cite misconduct by a number of Justice officials; and second, to get ahead of the news that the Obama Justice Department spied (yes, spied) on former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn beginning as early as August 2016.

But it was this little nugget—“News organizations did not publish Steele’s reports or reveal the FBI’s interest in them until after Election Day”—that sent Trump foes into the stratosphere. The voters-didn’t-know-about-the-FBI-investigating-Trump! meme joined Russian social media bots and brainwashed suburban moms as the latest part of the continuously evolving excuse for why Clinton suffered the most humiliating loss in electoral history.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/05/25/the-open-secret-of-the-fbis-investigation-of-trumps-campaign/
For days, the anti-Trump mob has leveraged that single sentence into a whole new plotline: The FBI helped Trump win the election by concealing the investigation from voters.

The Great Wall of Harvard By Ken Masugi

President Trump’s vow to change a “rigged system” helped propel him to victory over stodgy supporters of “liberal” and “conservative” non-alternatives. His Department of Justice has sided with Asian-Americans claiming discrimination in admissions at Harvard and, again on their behalf, expressed interest in the possibility of antitrust violations in early admissions to elite schools.

As the putatively Chinese proverb has it, one picture is worth a thousand words (or even a whole article). This graph depicts the issue:

Source: Althea Nagai, “Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions,” Center for Equal Opportunity, May 22, 2018.

Displayed are the percentages of Asian-American undergraduate students at California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University, from 1980 to 2015, based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics of the Department of Education.

Do elite universities in America discriminate against Asian-Americans and establish a quota in the form of a ceiling on their numbers? The graph above (the only one among the thousand or so words here) shows a plateau for MIT and Harvard against the results at Caltech, where undergraduate Asian-American enrollment has risen over 40 percent Caltech does not practice affirmative action (forbidden by the California constitution, courtesy of Proposition 209).