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Ruth King

Gone With the Windrush in Britain The Brits rebel against the results of their immigration policies.

Amber Rudd lost her job as U.K. Home Secretary this weekend amid a widening immigration scandal. Yet there’s every chance Britain’s political class—and voters—will let this crisis go to waste.

Ms. Rudd’s resignation is the latest fallout from the Windrush scandal. For two decades starting in the late 1940s, the U.K. accepted migrants from across the Empire (later, the Commonwealth) to rebuild after World War II. Known as the “Windrush generation” because one of the first ships to bring them was the HMT Empire Windrush, hundreds of thousands and their children worked hard, paid taxes, and assimilated into U.K. society.

A 1971 law granted these migrants permanent U.K. residence and a path to citizenship. But an unknown number either never obtained formal proof of their immigration status because they didn’t realize they needed it, or have lost the relevant paperwork. Now they’re running afoul of a 2012 law that requires employers, landlords and even hospitals to verify the immigration status of prospective tenants, employees or patients. Some face deportation.

That law was a product of Prime Minister Theresa May’s promise, when she was Home Secretary, to create a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants. David Cameron had pledged in 2010 to reduce annual net migration to below 100,000. Since Britain couldn’t limit arrivals from EU countries, Prime Minister Cameron and Mrs. May had to limit other skilled immigrants. They also concluded that ramping up deportations might help meet their targets.

The Iran-Israel Shadow War The 2015 nuclear deal has financed Iran’s Syria military buildup

The shadow war between Israel and Iran in Syria is heating up, and on Monday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised the stakes by revealing that Tehran is secretly maintaining its nuclear-weapons program.

In a presentation on national TV, Mr. Netanyahu revealed the country’s spooks had obtained “half a ton” of documents and CDs from a secret facility in the Shorabad District in southern Tehran. The Israeli leader claims the files “conclusively prove” that Iran lied about its nuclear-weapons program before signing Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear pact, and that it has since worked to preserve its nuclear-weapons related capabilities.

Mr. Netanyahu offered photographs, videos, charts and blueprints from the intelligence haul relating to Tehran’s Project Amad, which the Israeli leader called “a comprehensive program to design, build and test nuclear weapons.” The Iranians have always denied the existence of such a program, and the United Nations downplayed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions in 2015.

It’s no coincidence that Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif mentioned that 2015 U.N. assessment in a tweet Monday as evidence that Tehran should be trusted. Perhaps the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors would like to revisit those findings in light of this new evidence?

Mr. Netanyahu also claimed that the underground Fordow uranium enrichment facility was designed “from the get-go for nuclear weapons as part of Project Amad,” and misled the U.N. about its activities. The Iranians preserved Project Amad’s documentation and have kept its research team, headed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, largely in place in a new organization housed within the Defense Ministry.

Here’s a Collection of Ben Rhodes’ Tweets That Got Everything Wrong on Iran By David Steinberg

The Obama administration and the media outlets which disseminated Ben Rhodes’ (admitted) propaganda on the Iran nuclear deal were wrong about everything.

The Republicans, President Donald Trump, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were right.

Here’s a collection of Ben Rhodes on Twitter — now as a likely member of the alliance pushing the comical narrative of a 2018 “#BlueWave” — getting everything wrong on Iran right up until the past few weeks:
Ben Rhodes
✔ @brhodes
It would not be “so easy” since there is a far-reaching inspections and verification regime to ensure that Iran is abiding by its commitments (which it is). Will Trump achieve a similar regime in North Korea? Does he even know how these agreements work?
Ben Rhodes
✔ @brhodes

The Iran Deal imposes strict, verified limitations on Iran’s centrifuges and stockpile to prevent them from obtaining a nuclear weapon. What Trump has talked about on NK – a vague, unverified commitment to denuclearization – is nowhere near as restrictive as the Iran Deal.

The New York Times’ Hatchet Job On Devin Nunes Is Riddled With Errors The New York Times article is riddled with errors that multiple sources publicly deny. It fails to include information easily found in the public record. By Mollie Hemingway

Jason Zengerle publicly announced his profile of Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine with the snarky tweet, “My latest for the @NYTmag on Devin Nunes, who’s been propagating, not to mention falling for, conspiracy theories since before the Deep State was even in a gleam in Donald Trump’s eye.”

It’s an accurate summation of the hit he attempted to place on Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). The only problem is the case he attempts to make is riddled with errors and full of embarrassing and deliberate material omissions.

For example, Zengerle writes that a “suspicious” Nunes was wrong to believe that “Obama administration officials were ignoring evidence in a cache of documents collected from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, showing that Al Qaeda was much stronger than the administration publicly contended.” Zengerle says Nunes’ predecessor as chairman of the intel committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, agreed with Obama officials’ assessment and told Nunes the documents Defense Intelligence Agency officials were analyzing at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., showed nothing significant on that score.

“But Nunes wasn’t convinced. On a Saturday in May 2013, he flew from Washington to Tampa and paid a visit to Centcom headquarters himself, where he demanded to meet with the analysts reviewing the documents, in the hope of uncovering evidence of Al Qaeda’s strength—and an Obama administration cover-up,” Zengerle writes. “But after a meeting with the Army major general who headed Centcom’s intelligence wing, Nunes came back to Washington empty-handed.”

Kim Makes Stunning Nuclear Concessions to ‘Crazy Guy’ Trump: Gordon Chang

In the last two weeks, stunning developments, one right after another, have suggested the possibility that the Korean War armistice will be turned into a peace treaty, North Korea will surrender its most destructive weapons, and the two Koreas will merge into one state.

How did peace break out in perhaps the world’s most troubled region? You can thank, in large measure, President Donald Trump. That does not mean, however, that he will be able to turn the promising situation he created into an enduring peace. In short, Trump the disrupter must become Trump the disciplined leader.

Last Saturday, Kim Jong Un, seemingly unprompted, promised to suspend “mid-range and intercontinental ballistic rocket tests” and to close his “nuclear test site in northern area,” a reference to the Punggye-ri facility. Hours ago, the office of South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced that Kim will allow foreign observers to witness the closure of the site next month.

Friday, Kim and Moon, at their historic summit, signed the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity, and Unification of the Korean Peninsula. The declaration, among other things, signals the intention of the two Koreas to formally end the Korean War by signing a peace treaty, expresses the desire for reuniting the two Korean states, and commits both leaders to rid their peninsula of nuclear weapons.

Insane Israeli operation smuggled 110,000 secret nuclear files out of Iran by Philip Klein

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a dramatic news conference on Monday to accuse Iran of lying about its covert nuclear weapons program, the basis for his presentation was a vast trove of 110,000 files that were, insanely, smuggled out of a secret Iranian storage facility by Israeli intelligence agents.

At a time when some have questioned whether modern Israeli intelligence agencies are living up to their mythical status, this “Mission Impossible”-style operation is quite a message to its skeptics.

Last year, according to Netanyahu, Iran moved the files “to a highly secret location in Tehran” that from the outside looked like “a dilapidated warehouse” but that from the inside, was filled with large safes.

“A few weeks ago, in a great intelligence achievement, Israel obtained half a ton of the material inside these vaults,” Netanyahu said.

That’s not a misprint — a HALF A TON of materials!

The trove included: 55,000 pages of physical documents in binders; and another 55,000 files in 183 CDs.

Flooding the Voter Rolls in US and Greece by Maria Polizoidou

In principle, the idea is no different from George Soros’s 220-page guide seemingly to create a permanent voting majority for the Democratic Party by “enlarge[ing] the U.S. electorate by 10 million voters by 2018.”

Greece’s ruling Syriza coalition appears to be adopting a strategy of garnering votes from immigrants by expediting their naturalization process. It will be easier to obtain Greek citizenship than a fishing license.

A total of 800,000 immigrants — almost one-tenth of the native Greek population — will soon become citizens. Transposed to the United States, that would be the equivalent of 32,000,000 new voters.

As Greece struggles with accelerating economic decline and an increasing lack of public faith in the political leadership, the ruling Syriza coalition appears to be adopting a strategy of garnering votes from immigrants by expediting their naturalization process.

According to a recent report in the Greek daily Parapolitika, Interior Minister Panos Skourletis is laying the groundwork to enable hundreds of thousands of immigrants to become citizens and vote in the next elections. Although the mandate of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras ends in September 2019, some analysts have been predicting a call for elections by the end of 2018.

Until now, candidates for Greek citizenship had to be vetted by a committee. Under the new system, applicants will be granted citizenship automatically if they correctly answer 20 out of 30 questions online. In addition, the government is planning to allow immigrants over the age of 65 to obtain Greek IDs, without testing their knowledge of the Greek language. In other words, it will be easier to obtain Greek citizenship than a Greek fishing license. As a result, a total of 800,000 immigrants — almost one-tenth of the native Greek population — will soon become citizens. Transposed to the United States, that would be the equivalent of 32,000,000 new voters.

Turkey Calls on Europe to Criminalize “Islamophobia” by Uzay Bulut

Given Turkey’s inhospitable treatment of non-Muslims throughout the ages, it is the height of hypocrisy for its foreign minister to complain about Europe’s attitude towards Muslims, which has been the opposite of Islamophobic.

To refresh Çavuşoğlu’s memory, a review of Turkey’s record is in order.

By proposing to block all criticism of Islam on the grounds that it is “extremist, anti-immigrant, xenophobic and Islamophobic,” Çavuşoğlu is revealing that he would welcome banning free speech to protect a religious ideology.

At an event held in on April 11 to unveil the 2017 European Islamophobia Report — released by the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research — Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Çavuşoğlu called on EU governments to criminalize Islamophobia.

“There is no ideology or terminology called ‘Islamism’; There is only one Islam and it means ‘peace,'” he declared — incorrectly: salaam means peace; Islam means submission. He also claimed that populist politicians are “increasingly engaging in extremist, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and Islamophobic rhetoric to get a few more votes,” and that “centrist politicians are… using a similar rhetoric to get back the votes they have lost.”

Urging all politicians to recognize Islamophobia as “a hate crime and a form of racism” in their constitutions, Çavuşoğlu accused European judiciaries of applying a double standard by not paying as much attention to Islamophobia as they do to anti-Semitism. Using the Holocaust as an analogy, he continued: “There is no need to relive Auschwitz or wait for Muslims to be burned in gas chambers like Jewish people.”

Christie Davies London Letter: Immigration is Theft (August 10, 2016)

Leftists welcome immigrants, whom they perceive as useful tools in their quest to dilute and diminish the British people’s former sense of common history and culture. Curse you, Tony Blair, for quite deliberately fostering policies that have destroyed these forms of solidarity.

Britain is a very small island, a tiny off-shore fragment. England taken alone has a population of over fifty million crammed into a land area about twice the size of Tasmania. Due to immigration England now has the highest population density in Europe and the fifth-highest in the world. The last thing such a country, one that was once a major source of emigration, needs is more people. Yet it is experiencing very high levels of immigration due to the stupidity and wilfulness of its political rulers, who are happy to ignore the resentment felt by the ordinary citizen at this influx and some of whom, like Gordon Brown when he was prime minister, even condemn these ordinary voters as “racist”.

Between 1995 and 2014 an extra four million foreign-born people settled in the United Kingdom. In any one year as many as half a million new long-term immigrants arrive. England now has 419 people per square kilometre, which is up from 379 in 2001. England has overtaken the Netherlands in population density and it is England, not Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, where the immigrants are settling. It is projected that the density of population will rise to 460 people per square kilometre by 2030. The prospect is intolerable.

The result of this mass immigration has been a marked but deliberately concealed fall in the standard of living of the indigenous population and a large rise in inequality. The lying politicians, notably Tony Blair, have boasted about the rise in total national income due to the extra labour the migrants have provided, but most of this increase has gone in wages and welfare payments and services to the migrants themselves. Very little of it has ended up in the pockets of the indigenous population and that little has been completely offset by a rapid and substantial rise in house prices, as more people are crammed into a fixed space. Rents and mortgage payments have rocketed and these are of course a very large part of the expenditure of British citizens and particularly the poorer ones. Not only can the building industry not provide new dwellings fast enough, but as it tries to do so it gobbles up our unspoilt countryside. Britain is being concreted over and is ceasing to be a green and pleasant land. Travel has become impossible, with clogged roads and crowded trains. Our land has been stolen from us. Immigration is theft.

The Left-liberal proponents of an open-door policy, the ones who have imposed this hell on an unwilling people, are the same ideologues who whine about rising inequality. Yet immigration is a key cause of rising inequality. If there is an influx of relatively unskilled migrants, it is those among the indigenous population without skills or capital who are bound to lose out. The leftists were recently excited about Thomas Piketty’s best-selling and utterly misguided book Capital, which set out in an over-simple algebraic formula why we were getting more unequal. However, by capital Piketty meant wealth and a large part of that wealth consists of land and housing. It is the value of these that has risen enormously. When house prices rise there is a transfer of wealth in favour of those who own one from those who do not. Those who lose out are the ones struggling to purchase or rent one. My own modest house is worth ten times what I paid for it, far more than the rate of inflation. Today I could not afford to buy it. The situation is made worse by affluent foreigners buying up the better-quality housing purely as a speculative investment.

The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science How defective science harms public policy and damages our public schools. April 30, 2018 Lloyd Billingsley

“Most Americans don’t even know that the crisis exists,” explain David Randall and Christopher Welser of the National Association of Scholars. Help has now arrived in The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science: Cause, Consequences and the Road to Reform. The general reader might find the title puzzling but the concept is simple.

If a scientific study is to be legitimate, it must be reproducible because replication allows examination of the data and the possibility of different conclusions. If the study is not reproducible it is not really science, and as the authors show, that type of non-science is now common.

In June of 2016, Oona Lönnstedt and Peter Eklöv of Uppsala University published a paper in Science warning of the dangers of microplastic particles in the ocean. The study got considerable media attention but as it turned out, “Lönnstedt never performed the research that she and Eklöv reported.” So in philosophical terms, it had an existential problem, and veracity is also an issue.

In 2005, Dr. John Ioannidis argued, “shockingly and persuasively,” that most published research findings in his own field of medicine were false. This was due to many factors, including the limitations of statistics, “intellectual prejudices and conflicts of interest,” and researchers striving to produce positive results “in fashionable areas of research.” Based on these factors, the findings in other scientific fields were probably wrong too.