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Ruth King

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Latest Round Of Big Military Moves In The Middle East Shoshana Bryen

By on February 17th, 2018

There are lessons to be learned from Iran firing a drone into Israeli air space and Israel’s destruction of about half of Syria’s air defense capabilities in response:

Iran is testing not only its capabilities abroad, but the reactions of its enemies and its security on the home front
Israel is testing as well
Russia’s appears unwilling to take on any more military activity than absolutely necessary and is unwilling to confront Iran.
The US will stand by Israel, but may not be willing to push Iran out of Syria.

Iran

Iran’s goal is to operate militarily across Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon – north of its adversaries Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel. To this end, Iran “helped” move not only ISIS fighters, but tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs, from its westward path. Iran controls militias of more than 80,000 fighters in Syria. Israeli sources say there are 3,000 members of Iran’s IRGC commanding 9,000 Hizb’allah, and 10,000 “violent Shia militias recruited from across the Mideast, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.” The rest are Syrian.

Iran’s problem right now is at home. The government was surprised and more than a little bit worried about the rolling demonstrations across the country in January. The protests were broad-based, widespread and deliberately provocative. The image of an elderly Iranian woman climbing on a wall (with some difficulty) to remove and wave her hijab couldn’t have made the mullahs feel secure. And when a government has to look over its shoulder at its restive population, its room to maneuver abroad is constrained.

It was necessary, then, for the mullahs to have a victory, so they claimed one.

Just in time for the 39th-anniversary celebration of the Iranian revolution, Iran showed a variety of homemade, nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, claiming the missiles can hit Israel from Iranian territory. As for the drone – Iran denied its existence and simply cheered its Syrian ally’s air defenses, claiming that Israel had lost its military edge in the region. Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi told Russian TV, “Reports of downing an Iranian drone flying over Israel and also Iran’s involvement in attacking an Israeli jet are so ridiculous… Iran only provides military advice to Syria.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Cornell Professor: The American Dream Is a ‘Hallucination’ By Tom Knighton see note please

By on February 17th, 2018

Room, board, tuition and other fees cost $65,495.00 at Cornell. The average salary for professors there is $285,000. rsk

Cornell University’s Prof. Eric Cheyfitz isn’t a fan of the American Dream, it seems. The problem isn’t that he thinks it’s bad — it seems he believes the American Dream isn’t reality.

The Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters spoke at an event hosted by the Institute for Comparative Modernities on Tuesday. During the talk, he referred to his latest book, The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States. In it, he takes aim at the White House.

Yet, oddly enough, it’s not the Trump administration he focused on:

Obama’s speeches, he said, are classic examples of what Cheyfitz defines as “disinformation,” or the “rupture of political rhetoric from political reality with fatal results.”

In other words, Trump and our current political situation are not, contrary to what many people may think, the causes of disinformation.

“Trump is not the problem — he is the latest symptom of the problem,” Cheyfitz explained. Rather, the country’s major issue is the overlapping, “imbricated pair of income inequality and climate change.”

Cheyfitz also said:

If I were to sum up the book in one sentence, I would say it is a historical explanation about how and why the United States is still trying to live a narrative, American exceptionalism, that fails to rationalize the state any longer.

“This story has always confused capitalism with democracy when in fact the two systems are fundamentally at odds.”

This nonsense isn’t surprising coming from an academic. CONTINUE AT SITE

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

An Understanding of Islamic Supremacism Must Drive U.S. National Security and Foreign Policy By Ben Weingarten

By on February 17th, 2018

The Trump administration’s new National Vetting Center, housed within the Department of Homeland Security, could provide a needed boost to our defenses if it streamlines and coordinates the information collection and sharing processes between relevant immigration and national security agencies, rather than adding to the bureaucratic thicket.

While it is critical to get the mechanism for keeping harmful actors such as jihadists out of the U.S. right, equally if not more important is that we get right the vetting process itself. On this, the executive memorandum is silent.

What does the administration believe about vetting? The first iteration of President Trump’s terror entry executive order, inaccurately maligned as a “travel ban,” sheds light on his thinking.

The purpose of that executive order was to

…ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including “honor” killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.

The executive order echoed a statement President Trump made while on the stump in a pivotal August 2016 speech on fighting Islamic terrorism. Emphasizing the ideological nature of this struggle, then-candidate Trump stated:

In the Cold War, we had an ideological screening test. The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today.

In addition to screening out all members or sympathizers of terrorist groups, we must also screen out any who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles – or who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law.

Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into the country.

In that same speech, the president declared that one of his first acts if elected would be to establish a “Commission on Radical Islam,” the express purpose of which would be two-fold: (i) To “identify and explain to the American public the core convictions and beliefs of Radical Islam, to identify the warning signs of radicalization, and to expose the networks in our society that support radicalization;” and (ii) To “develop new protocols for local police officers, federal investigators, and immigration screeners.”

The lack of such a top-down analysis has plagued America since before 9/11. One wonders, how could our national security and foreign policy apparatus not study what President Obama himself termed the “one organizing principle” among the jihadist enemies facing us, of Islam? Moreover, how could U.S. government officials, notably including former FBI Director Robert Mueller, possibly purge the lexicon intrinsic to and trainers steeped in the theopolitical, Sharia-based threat doctrine motivating Islamic supremacists? You must understand your enemy’s animating ideology if you wish to defeat him. Conducting an honest study of Islamic supremacism, and the goals, tactics and strategies of its adherents would seem to be the essential first step to developing a strategy to comprehensively counter them.

When it comes to vetting to prevent Islamic supremacists from entering the homeland, third-party analyses based in such an understanding of the enemy – dishonest and determined though he may be — provide promising recommendations for keeping us safe.

The Trump National Security Strategy itself rightfully recognizes the importance of understanding Sharia supremacism in fighting jihad. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mueller indicts 13 Russians for interfering in US election

By on February 17th, 2018

Special counsel Robert Mueller has brought charges against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian groups for interfering with the 2016 U.S. elections.

The explosive new charges allege that the Russians created false U.S. personas and stole the identities of real U.S. people in order to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, an assessment previously reached by U.S. intelligence agencies.

“This indictment serves as a reminder that people are not always who they appear to be on the Internet,” Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein said at a press briefing announcing the indictments.

“The indictment alleges that the Russian conspirators want to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy.”

President Trump, who has repeatedly cast doubt on whether Russia interfered with the election, has been briefed on the indictments, the White House said.

The efforts, which began in 2014, were connected to the so-called Internet Research Agency, a shadowy Russian operation based in St. Petersburg that leveraged Facebook and other social media platforms to spread divisive messages leading up to the 2016 election.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Elizabeth Warren Went Native Daniel J. Flynn

By on February 17th, 2018

Elizabeth Warren looks like the love-child of Tilda Swinton and Edgar Winter. She talks like Ward Churchill, Iron Eyes Cody, and so many others who hail from the Cigar Store Indian Tribe.

“I understand that tribal membership is determined by tribes — and only by tribes,” fake Indian Warren told a conference of real Indians on Wednesday. “I never used my family tree to get a break or get ahead. I never used it to advance my career.”

Only she did.

The blue-eyed blonde listed herself as a minority in academic directories prior to obtaining employment by Harvard Law. After gaining tenure, her minority designation disappeared.

Warren now may downplay her invented ancestry’s role in obtaining employment but Harvard then boasted about it.

“Although the conventional wisdom among students and faculty is that the law school faculty includes no minority women, [then Harvard Law spokesman Mike] Chmura said professor of law Elizabeth Warren is Native American,” reported the Harvard Crimson 22 years ago.

No tribe recognizes her as one of their own and genealogy records show no evidence of even great-grandparents hailing from Native American ancestry. The record does show Warren attending a good law school, albeit the type that does not typically send on graduates to Ivy League schools to teach and does not ever send them to Harvard.

Warren graduated from Rutgers Law, which currently comes in at 62 — above Georgia State but below the University of Tennessee — in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. When I examined faculty at Harvard Law five years ago, I discovered that more than half of Harvard Law’s professors and assistant professors received their degrees from Harvard Law. Outside of specialists who obtained degrees outside of the field of law, every professor and assistant professor at the school graduated from a top-ten law school and just five graduated from a law-school in the bottom half of the top ten. Nobody from Rutgers Law besides Warren has ever received tenure from Harvard Law.

The incestuous culture of Harvard that imagines that elite minds only attend elite schools exhibits problems of its own. But clearly practice dictates that they exclusively grant tenure to those from the best of the best schools. Elizabeth Warren strikes as the sole counterexample.

Though the senior senator from Massachusetts depicts those mocking her as mocking Native Americans, she clearly mocked them in falsely portraying herself as a member of their historically-underrepresented group to obtain a job for which she did not possess the requisite qualifications. In doing so, she made a farce of affirmative action in a manner similar to the forgettable but amusing 1986 comedy, Soul Man.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Historically Yours- La Guardia, The Jews And Hitler

By on February 17th, 2018

In 1922, Republican New York Congressman Fiorello La Guardia ran for
reelection and was opposed by a Tammany-backed Jewish candidate.
Sensing the opportunity to drive a wedge between La Guardia and his
Jewish supporters, the opposition circulated a flier in the Jewish
tenements calling La Guardia “a pronounced Jew hater.”

La Guardia fought back in a most unusual manner. He imposed one condition,
namely, that the entire debate be spoken exclusively in Yiddish.
Completely stunned, his opponent could not accept the proposal.

La Guardia, nicknamed the Little Flower (he was 5’2”) won reelection. La
Guardia was born in 1882 in Greenwich Village to his parents of
different religions. His Catholic father was Achille Luigi Carlo La
Guardia and his observant Jewish mother was Irene Lazzato Coen. To
maintain their heritage within the home, Achille spoke Italian to
Fiorello while Irene spoke to him in Yiddish. La Guardia became fluent
in both languages. Fiorello had earned a great reputation as a young
attorney among the Lower East Side’s immigrant Jewish garment workers
by representing many of them in court without charge. He also became
an early advocate for Jewish rights.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

MONSTERS AND MADNESS BY EDWARD CLINE

By on February 17th, 2018

Pamela Geller said she will never surrender.

“They lost the election, and then lost their minds.”

I promised some movie reviews. These reviews reflect the abandonment of cause and effect, logical plots, reason, and endings that make sense.I discuss some Netflix movie fare: Just note the ubiquity of the epistemological disintegration in movies. I’m not making it up or exaggerating.

The Batman comics and films have spawned a Netflix TV series. First of all is Dr. Hugo Strange (http://de-beta.imdb.com/list/ls077979301/) director of a Gotham insane asylum. He’s Chinese. He lets free as certifiably “sane” Oswald Cobblepot to advance an unspoken conspiracy of his own. He keeps frozen bodies in the basement of the asylum. He’s “reanimated” the body of the original “Mr. Freeze” and black crime queen Fish Mooney and other deceased criminals, and kept them in preserved until he reanimates them to unleash vengeance and chaos in Gotham. “Mr. Freeze,” committed suicide after his wife dies of some unidentified disease he was trying to save her from. He froze himself to death.

Another stinker: “The Cloverfield Paradox.” Time: the near future. If you remember or ever saw “Cloverfield” a few years ago (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1060277/), it was a black-and-white (and now a color) Hollywood product about some mysterious, and possibly undersea creature or alien, raiding Manhattan. The Head of the Statue of Liberty is knocked off and sent to land on Fifth Avenue. No explanation was given what it was. Film ends with the creature trapping a surviving couple in Central Park, their fate unknown. Actions in the whole film visually recorded on some character’s camera phone as he and his friends try to outrun the creature.

“The Cloverfield Paradox” is supposed to be a follow-up. And apparently there is a series and a fan base. (http://im.bia2moviez.com/title/tt2548396) It is mostly set on a space station whose purpose is to test some device to supply the earth with free energy (man is running out of energy supplies, war may break out). The crew tries over and over again to get the device to work. Then it works and the earth disappears and the station is in unknown space. The explanation is that man has introduced an alternate universe. Strange things begin to happen. One of the crew painlessly loses his right arm; he’s left with only a stump, which is volitional and can write messages.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: GUNS AND HYPERBOLE

By on February 16th, 2018

I have been around guns my entire adult life. My father, my brother and my husband- gentle, kind and peaceful gentlemen- all owned guns. I spent many evenings before a fireplace in Connecticut cleaning, oiling and polishing handguns.

Each tragedy begets screeching about guns from both sides in the debate. A dear and scholarly friend- a physician, master carpenter and conservative sent me the following note which is a fair appraisal:

“Another awful day of carnage at the hands of an unstable young man wielding an automatic rifle. I’m all for protecting the Constitution, but when the writers penned the Second Amendment, fire arms were muzzle loaders that required three stages of ramming home powder, then wadding, and then the ball. No one envisioned even an all in one bullet comprising all three that could go directly into the breach of the weapon, much less automatic rapid-firing weapons with 30 round clips. AR-15s are military weapons used for killing humans in battle.

There is no reason for such weapons to be available for purchase by consumers other than the armed forces and law enforcement. With all due respect to the rights of hunters, why should such a weapon be used for hunting? Is the hunter fearful that the deer might shoot back if the first shot misses its mark and therefore needs to get off multiple rounds quickly to be certain the animal is dispatched? Background checks on buyers are certainly necessary but do not come into play on the secondary market where people with clean records purchasing guns make a profit when re-selling to folks who might not qualify as a gun buyer.

The issue can be dealt with while preserving the Second Amendment rights as envisioned by the founding fathers. I do not hunt, but my friends that do would give up the sport if their prowess was so bad as to require an automatic, big clip weapon.” M.M.M.D.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islamic Anti-Semitism in France: Toward Ethnic Cleansing by Guy Millière

By on February 16th, 2018

Graffiti on Jewish-owned homes warn the owners to “flee immediately” if they want to live. Anonymous letters with live bullets are dropped into mailboxes of Jews.

Laws meant to punish anti-Semitic threats are now used to punish those who denounce the threats. A new edition of a public school history textbook for the eighth grade states that in France it is forbidden to criticize Islam.

Those French Jews who can leave the country, leave. Most departures are hasty; many Jewish families sell their homes well below the market price. Jewish districts that once were thriving are now on the verge of extinction.

“The problem is that anti-Semitism today in France comes less from the far right than from individuals of Muslim faith or culture”. — Former Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

Friday, January 12, 2018. Sarcelles. A city in the northern suburbs of Paris. A 15-year-old girl returns from high school. She wears a necklace with a star of David and a Jewish school uniform. A man attacks her with a knife, slashes her face, and runs away. She will be disfigured the rest of her life.

January 29, again in Sarcelles, an 8-year-old boy wearing a Jewish skullcap is kicked and punched by two teenagers.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

What’s Oozing Out of Campuses Is Polluting Society We should be trying to understand others of all backgrounds and situations, not pushing them away. By Michael Barone

By on February 16th, 2018

In a 1989 article in The New Republic, Andrew Sullivan made what he called “a (conservative) case for gay marriage.” Today same-sex marriage is legal everywhere in America, supported by majorities of voters and accepted as a part of American life.

Now Sullivan has cast his gaze on what he regards as a disturbing aspect of American life — the extension of speech suppression and “identity politics” from colleges and universities into the larger society. The hothouse plants of campus mores have become invasive species undermining and crowding out the beneficent flora of the larger free democratic society.

Sullivan can be seen as a kind of undercover spy on campuses, to which he is invited often to speak — because of his bona fides as a cultural reformer — by those probably ignorant of the parenthetical “conservative” in his 1989 article. As Jonathan Rauch did in his 2004 book, “Gay Marriage,” Sullivan argued that same-sex marriage, by including those previously excluded, would strengthen rather than undermine family values and bourgeois domesticity. That now seems to be happening.

The spread of campus values to the larger society would — and is intended to — have the opposite effect.

Take the proliferation of campus speech codes. Americans of a certain age have trouble believing that colleges and universities have rules banning supposedly hurtful speech. They can remember when campuses were the part of America most open to dissent. Now students are disciplined for handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution outside a tiny isolated “free speech zone.”

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