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Ruth King

A Cancer Scare Defeat in California A judge enjoins warning labels based on bad science.

Cancer is a scary disease, but Californians have been determined to scare themselves more than most with warnings about the supposedly cancer-causing material in everything from shoes to cat litter. Now a federal judge says these mandatory fright signs may violate the First Amendment when not backed by accurate science.

Judge William Shubb issued a preliminary injunction two weeks ago blocking California from compelling businesses to issue warnings about a chemical known as glyphosate. Farm groups and businesses sued after the state required new cancer warnings on food products that contain wheat, corn, soybeans and other crops exposed to the common herbicide.

The Environmental Protection Agency has deemed that glyphosate is safe, and California’s Office on Environmental Health Hazard Assessment also found it “unlikely to pose a cancer hazard to humans.” But under the 1986 state Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, also known as Prop. 65, California defers to the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. In 2015 the France-based United Nations outfit claimed glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic.”

Reuters later revealed that the U.N. agency ignored substantial evidence showing no link between glyphosate and cancer. One adviser to the agency, Christopher Portier, worked on the glyphosate decision even as he received pay from Lundy & Lundy, a law firm that brings cancer-related class-action lawsuits, according to a deposition in a different lawsuit.

The U.N. outfit is notorious for bad science. The group has assessed 1,067 products and ruled only once that a substance was “probably not carcinogenic to humans.” The group’s list of cancer risks includes eating red meat, french fries or “pickled vegetables (traditional Asian),” drinking “very hot beverages,” using fluorescent lights, working the late shift, having your dentist fill a cavity, getting your hair colored, and using aloe, talc or Tylenol.

‘A Foreign Policy for the Left’ Review: Can There Be a ‘Decent’ Left? The editor of Dissent magazine asks his comrades for a more nuanced moral response to America’s use of power abroad. Martin Peretz reviews ‘A Foreign Policy for the Left’ by Michael Walzer.*****

Michael Walzer, now 83, is the unanointed dean of the American left. The editor of Dissent magazine for more than 30 years, he has written a book criticizing his comrades’ foreign policy and, subtly but unmistakably, their worldview. He sees both as morally lacking and advocates something more humane and more engaged.

Mr. Walzer is a leftist not for psychological or emotional reasons but for moral ones. He believes, a priori, in practicing human decency: a moral sensibility toward other people and their existences. He thinks that capitalism’s inequality has coarsened this sensibility but that capital’s productive capacity can be harnessed, through political action, to transcend the capitalist system: to create societies where people can live more equally and so be more decent to one another. The aim is democratic socialism, the means are helping “oppressed men and women to become political agents who control their own lives.”

The danger of this a priori politics is vanguardism, under which acolytes of an ideal believe that the ideal is more important than how they reach it. Where Mr. Walzer differs is that he believes that if the aim is decency, the means must be decent. This requires departing from theory and practicing a politics of distinction, “[paying] close attention to local circumstance and particular histories” and “[thinking] hard about the relation of means to ends.”

It also requires a foreign policy of distinctions, of recognizing that people labor under different kinds of oppression that call for different kinds of responses. And it requires recognizing that local resistance to oppression varies: Sometimes, as in Cuba, people who speak in the name of the oppressed simply want to use them as tools for power. Mr. Walzer is an honest leftist, and he tries to keep his comrades honest, too.

But he isn’t sure whether many of them are. “A Foreign Policy for the Left” reads like an anguished plea to comrades who have strayed so far from a politics of distinction and decency that the author doesn’t know whether they can be brought back. According to Mr. Walzer, the left’s vanguardism has put it in bed with dictators, fanatics and activists who reject reasoned debate as a means to democratic change.

This is most obvious to Mr. Walzer in foreign policy, because it’s so extreme. He gives many examples: leftists’ unwillingness to engage with unionist and feminist allies in Afghanistan and Iraq because American intervention as a force for good didn’t fit their theory of America as a force for evil; their mischaracterization of America’s world reach as totalistic, which allows blame always to ricochet back to us; their lumping in of Israel with despotic and imperialist regimes, ignoring the unique historical situation in which this encircled democracy finds itself; their attraction to thinkers like Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek —the last of whom preaches, Lenin-like, violence by the few in the name of change. CONTINUE AT SITE

Antifa Radical Charged with Hateful Vandalism Raises Over $80k Thanks to LA Times Article By Debra Heine

An antifa-supporting activist who was charged last summer for vandalizing people’s cars and fences with hateful, racist graffiti, has raised over $80,000 in the past 24 hours, thanks to the sympathetic reporting of the Los Angeles Times, a watchdog has discovered.

Ismael Chamu, 21, allegedly spray-painted people’s cars and fences with “F— White People,” “F— the police,” “F— frat Boys,” “Kill Cops,” “Kill Yuppies,” “Eat the Rich,” and “Class War,” Far Left Watch reported. He was arrested on June 27, 2017, while brandishing a knife “in the same location and on the same night that 30 instances of slashed tires and graffiti occurred.”

He was initially released without charge after being in jail for 39 hours, whereupon he immediately accused the police of racially-profiling him. This led to a public outcry in support of Chamu and against the Berkeley Police Department. The Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) and the Antifa-friendly Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín publicly condemned the “unlawful detainment” of the “Latino student.”

It took Far Left Watch’s determined research to uncover the truth about this supposed victim of “racial profiling.” Chamu had recently published a (now deleted) blog post advocating for “anti-gentrification vandalism,” calling gentrification a “disease,” and praising the violent tactics of Antifa. CONTINUE AT SITE

German Court Orders Volkswagen Rehire Suspected ISIS Recruiter Who Told Coworkers They’d ‘All Die’ By Tyler O’Neil

A German employment court ruled that the automobile giant Volkswagen would have to reinstate an employee they fired in 2016 for allegedly recruiting people to fight for the Islamic State (ISIS) and threatening coworkers. The employee was also connected to ISIS fighters, according to police.

The Hanover State Employment Court ruled that Samir B., a German-Algerian tire fitter who worked for Volkswagen for 8 years, was unlawfully fired. The court ordered that Volkswagen reinstate Samir B. in one month’s time.

Two of Samir B.’s known associates had travelled to Syria in 2014 to join ISIS and were later killed fighting for the Islamist terror group. In December 2014, the employee was stopped at Hanover Airport before boarding a flight to Istanbul, Turkey, carrying €9,350 and a drone.

Authorities were convinced Samir B. had been planning to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS, and they confiscated his passport, Britain’s Daily Mail reported.

Samir B. also reportedly threatened colleagues, telling them they would “all die.”

Volkswagen’s lawyers and the administrative Court of Braunschweig argued that it was proven Samir B. “was involved in the recruitment and support of Islamic fighters from Wolfsburg.”

Even so, the Hanover judge ruled that the employee’s firing was illegal. Volkswagen had been unable to state that the “operational peace” of the plant had been “specifically disturbed,” the Express reported. CONTINUE AT SITE

Haley: UN Security Council ‘Will Not Survive’ if Russia Not Held Accountable for UK Poison Attack By Bridget Johnson

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley declared Wednesday that the credibility of the UN Security Council “will not survive if we fail to hold Russia accountable” for the use of a deadly nerve agent on UK soil against a former double agent.

Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy who fed intelligence to the Brits from 1995 to 2004 and was sent to the UK in a spy exchange in 2010, and his daughter Yulia collapsed March 4 at a shopping center in Salisbury. Both are in critical yet stable condition. The first police officer on scene, Nick Bailey, is still hospitalized in serious condition. A restaurant and a pub in the center tested positive for traces of the nerve agent as military personnel clean up the crime scene and surrounding area.

Prime Minister Theresa May said Monday that the two were poisoned with part of a group of nerve agents known as “Novichok,” and the UK has determined that Russia either attempted an assassination on UK soil or let WMD nerve agents on the loose. May called for a “full range of measures… in response” if Russia ignores UK requests to explain the attempted murder, and called upon NATO allies to back that response.

“The Russians complained recently that we criticize them too much,” Haley said. “If the Russian government stopped using chemical weapons to assassinate its enemies; and if the Russian government stopped helping its Syrian ally to use chemical weapons to kill Syrian children; and if Russia cooperated with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons by turning over all information related to this nerve agent, we would stop talking about them. We take no pleasure in having to constantly criticize Russia, but we need Russia to stop giving us so many reasons to do so.”

“Russia must fully cooperate with the UK’s investigation and come clean about its own chemical weapons program,” she added. “Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council. It is entrusted in the United Nations Charter with upholding international peace and security. It must account for its actions.”

Haley warned that “if we don’t take immediate, concrete measures to address this now, Salisbury will not be the last place we see chemical weapons used.”

“They could be used here in New York or in cities of any country that sits on this council,” she added. “This is a defining moment. Time and time again, member states say they oppose the use of chemical weapons under any circumstance. Now, one member stands accused of using chemical weapons on the sovereign soil of another member.”

Russian envoy Vissaly Nebenzia claimed that the British may have staged a false-flag attack to make Russia look bad ahead of the World Cup. “No scientific research or development under the title Novichok were carried out,” he said. “…Most probable source of this agent are the countries who have carried out research on these weapons, including Britain.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Robert Mueller’s Beltway Cover-Up : Lee Smith

By using the justice system as a political weapon, Mueller and his supporters in both parties are confirming what many Americans already believe: We are not all equal under one law.

News that special counselor Robert Mueller has turned his attention to Erik Prince’s January 11, 2017 meeting in the Seychelles with a Russian banker, a Lebanese-American political fixer, and officials from the United Arab Emirates, helps clarify the nature of Mueller’s work. It’s not an investigation that the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is leading—rather, it’s a cover-up.

After all, Mueller took his job not at the behest of the man who by all accounts he is likely to professionally and personally disdain, Donald Trump, but of the blue-chip Beltway elite of which he is a charter member. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed him nearly a year ago to lead an investigation without parameters. That’s because Mueller’s job is to obscure the abuses of the US surveillance apparatus that occurred under the Obama administration.

The fact that someone at the level of former FBI director was called in to sweep up the mess left by bad actors in the bureau and Central Intelligence Agency and other parts of the intelligence bureaucracy suggests that the problems are even worse than previously thought. And that means the constituency for Mueller’s political intervention is enormous.

Mueller is said to believe that the Prince meeting was to set up a back channel with the Kremlin. But that makes no sense. According to the foundational text of the collusion narrative, the dossier allegedly written by former British spy Christopher Steele, the Kremlin had cultivated Trump himself for years. So what’s the purpose of a back channel, when Vladimir Putin already had a key to the front door of Mar-a-Lago?

Further, the collusion thesis holds that the Trump circle teamed with high-level Russian officials for the purpose of winning the 2016 election. How does a meeting that Erik Prince had a week before Trump’s inauguration advance the crooked election victory plot? It doesn’t—it contradicts it.

DANIEL MOYNIHAN’S HISTORIC SPEECH AT THE UNITED NATIONS NOV. 10, 1975****

On 10 November 1975 by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions), the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, which declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. That vote came one year after UNGA 3237 granted the PLO “observer status”, following Arafat’s “olive branch” speech to the General Assembly in November 1974.

Daniel Moynihan, United States Ambassador to the United Nations delivered this eloquent and stinging response the same day the resolution was passed:

“There appears to have developed in the United Nations the practice for a number of countries to combine for the purpose of doing something outrageous, and thereafter, the outrageous thing having been done, to profess themselves outraged by those who have the temerity to point it out, and subsequently to declare themselves innocent of any wrong-doing in consequence of its having been brought about wholly in reaction to the “insufferable” acts of those who pointed the wrong-doing out in the first place. Out of deference to these curious sensibilities, the United States chose not to speak in advance of this vote: we speak in its aftermath and in tones of the utmost concern.

The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.

Not three weeks ago, the United States Representative in the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee pleaded in measured and fully considered terms for the United Nations not to do this thing. It was, he said, “obscene.” It is something more today, for the furtiveness with which this obscenity first appeared among us has been replaced by a shameless openness.

There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act will have done the United Nations. Historians will do that for us, and it is sufficient for the moment only to note the foreboding fact. A great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of anti-Semitism — as this year’s Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov observed in Moscow just a few days ago — the abomination of anti-Semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty — and more — to the murderers of the six million European Jews. Evil enough in itself, but more ominous by far is the realization that now presses upon us — the realization that if there were no General Assembly, this could never have happened.

As this day will live in infamy, it behooves those who sought to avert it to declare their thoughts so that historians will know that we fought here, that we were not small in number — not this time — and that while we lost, we fought with full knowledge of what indeed would be lost.

Nor should any historian of the event, nor yet any who have participated in it, suppose, that we have fought only as governments, as chancelleries, and on an issue well removed from the concerns of our respective peoples. Others will speak for their nations: I will speak for mine.

In all our postwar history there had not been another issue which has brought forth such unanimity of American opinion. The President of the United States has from the first been explicit: This must not happen. The Congress of the United States in a measure unanimously adopted in the Senate and sponsored by 436 of 437 Representatives in the House, declared its utter opposition. Following only American Jews themselves, the American trade union movements was first to the fore in denouncing this infamous undertaking. Next, one after another, the great private institutions of American life pronounced anathema in this evil thing — and most particularly, the Christian churches have done so. Reminded that the United Nations was born in struggle against just such abominations as we are committing today — the wartime alliance of the United Nations dates from 1942 — the United Nations Association of the United States has for the first time in its history appealed directly to each of the 141 other delegations in New York not to do this unspeakable thing.

The proposition to be sanctioned by a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations is that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Now this is a lie. But as it is a lie which the United Nations has now declared to be a truth, the actual truth must be restated.

The very first point to be made is that the United Nations has declared Zionism to be racism — without ever having defined racism. “Sentence first — verdict afterwards,” as the Queen of Hearts said. But this is not wonderland, but a real world, where there are real consequences to folly and to venality. Just on Friday, the President of the General Assembly, speaking on behalf of Luxembourg, warned not only of the trouble which would follow from the adoption of this resolution but of its essential irresponsibility — for, he noted, members have wholly different ideas as to what they are condemning. “It seems to me that before a body like this takes a decision they should agree very clearly on what they are approving or condemning, and it takes more time.”

Lest I be unclear, the United Nations has in fact on several occasions defined “racial discrimination.” The definitions have been loose, but recognizable. It is “racism,” incomparably the more serious charge — racial discrimination is a practice; racism is a doctrine — which has never been defined. Indeed, the term has only recently appeared in the United Nations General Assembly documents. The one occasion on which we know the meaning to have been discussed was the 1644th meeting of the Third Committee on December 16, 1968, in connection with the report of the Secretary-General on the status of the international convention on the elimination of all racial discrimination. On that occasion — to give some feeling for the intellectual precision with which the matter was being treated — the question arose, as to what should be the relative positioning of the terms “racism” and “Nazism” in a number of the “preambular paragraphs.” The distinguished delegate from Tunisia argued that “racism” should go first because “Nazism was merely a form of racism.” Not so, said the no less distinguished delegate from the Union Soviet Socialist Republics. For, he explained, “Nazism contained the main elements of racism within its ambit and should be mentioned first.” This is to say that racism was merely a form of Nazism.

The discussion wound to its weary and inconclusive end, and we are left with nothing to guide us for even this one discussion of “racism” confined itself to world orders in preambular paragraphs, and did not at all touch on the meaning of the words as such. Still, one cannot but ponder the situation we have made for ourselves in the context of the Soviet statement on that not so distant occasion. If, as the distinguished delegate declared, racism is a form of Nazism — and if, as this resolution declares, Zionism is a form of racism — then we have step to step taken ourselves to the point of proclaiming — the United Nations is solemnly proclaiming — that Zionism is a form of Nazism.

What we have here is a lie — a political lie of a variety well known to the twentieth century, and scarcely exceeded in all that annal of untruth and outrage. The lie is that Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth is that is it not. READ IT ALL

EU: More Censorship to “Protect” You by Judith Bergman

There appears to be a huge disconnect here between the EU’s professed concern for keeping Europeans safe — as expressed in the one-hour rule — and the EU’s actual refusal to keep Europeans safe in the offline world. The result is that Europeans, manipulated by an untransparent, unaccountable body, will not be kept safe either online or off. And what if the content in question, as has already occurred, may be trying to warn the public about terrorism?

Regardless of these facts, including that women can no longer exercise their freedom to walk in safety in many neighborhoods of European cities, the EU has staunchly refused to stop the influx of migrants. It is, therefore, difficult to take seriously in any way the European Commission’s claim that the security, offline and online, of EU citizens is a “top priority”. If that were true, why does not Europe simply close the borders? Instead, the EU actually sues EU countries — Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — who refuse to endanger their citizens by admitting the quota of migrants that the EU assigns for them.

These EU ultimatums also fail to take into account what a recent study showed: that the second most important factor in the radicalization of Muslims, after Islam itself, is the environment, namely the mosques and imams to which Muslims go and on which they rely. Although the internet evidently does play a role in the radicalization process, the study showed that face-to-face encounters were more important, and that dawa, proselytizing Islam, plays a central role in this process.

On March 1, The European Commission — the unelected executive branch of the European Union — told social media companies to remove illegal online terrorist content within an hour, or risk facing EU-wide legislation on the topic. The ultimatum was part of a new set of recommendations that will apply to all forms of “illegal content” online, “from terrorist content, incitement to hatred and violence, child sexual abuse material, counterfeit products and copyright infringement.”

The European Commission said, “Considering that terrorist content is most harmful in the first hours of its appearance online, all companies should remove such content within one hour from its referral as a general rule”.

Fundamentalist Terrorists Benefit from “Fundamental Fairness” by Sandra Parker

Sandra Parker is an attorney and the Chairwoman of the Christians United for Israel Action Fund.

An American jury unanimously found the PLO and the Palestinian Authority (PA) liable for the terror that had been inflicted against these American citizens.

Late last year, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the verdict. The Circuit’s strange reasoning was that “fundamental fairness” does not allow U.S. courts to exercise civil jurisdiction over terrorists who act outside of U.S. territory.

American courts have long held that the Due Process Clause does not bar the federal government from freezing the assets of terrorists, bringing them to face criminal trial, or even imposing the death penalty upon them.

Given the Second Circuit Court’s controversial decision, the case warrants an opinion from the Supreme Court.

In January of 2002, a 28-year-old Palestinian woman named Wafa Idris detonated a 22-pound bomb outside a Jerusalem shoe store. The explosion killed 81-year-old Pinhas Tokatli, and injured more than 100 other people – including an American citizen named Mark Sokolow. His wife and two of his daughters were also wounded in the attack.

Two years later, Sokolow joined with ten other American families who had been wounded or lost loved ones at the hands of Palestinian terrorists, and sued the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under the 1992 Antiterrorism Act.

The plaintiffs in the case alleged that Idris and other Palestinian terrorists had killed and wounded Americans with the PLO’s support. In addition, in what has come to be known as the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) “pay-to-slay” policy, the plaintiffs also alleged that terrorists and their families were receiving salaries and stipends as compensation for their crimes.

Hillary Clinton, Pride of Radcliffe By Roger Kimball

The Harvard Crimson last week announced that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would receive the Radcliffe Medal on May 25 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Past recipients of the honor, given annually to individuals (usually women) who have had “a transformative impact on society,” include U.S. Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor, the tennis player Billie Jean King, the writer Toni Morrison, and another former secretary of state, Madeleine K. Albright.

Lizabeth Cohen, the dean of the Radcliffe Institute, noted the award to Clinton was being made “in recognition of her accomplishments in the public sphere as a champion for human rights, as a skilled legislator, and as an advocate for global American leadership.” Dean Cohen went on to describe Clinton as “a model of what it takes to transform society: a lifetime of relentless effort combined with the vision and dedication to overcome one’s inevitable defeats.”

The Crimson omitted any specifics about Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments as a “champion for human rights,” her prowess and achievements as a legislator, or the results of her advocacy of “American global leadership.” Nor did it dilate on her role as a “model” of someone whose efforts had transformed society while serving as beacon of hope and propriety for those struggling with life’s “inevitable defeats.”

A full inventory of Clinton’s activities in these areas would be tediously long. But as the Evangelist Matthew admonished (5:15), one should not hide one’s light under a bushel but rather let it “so shine before men, that they may see” one’s good works. So let me at least partially redress Dean Cohen’s unaccountable oversight, which was doubtless predicated upon Hillary Clinton’s native reticence, and mention just a few of the accomplishments that qualify her for this signal honor.

Many readers, dazzled by the memory of Clinton’s recent presidential campaign, may be a bit shaky about her long history of private-sector accomplishment and public service. Here, without pretending to anything like completeness, are a few highlights.