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Ruth King

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Parkland’s Enforcement Failures The public-safety bureaucracies failed on multiple levels.

By on February 24th, 2018

Any response by public authorities to do something in response to the killings in Parkland, Fla., must first come to grips with why established security measures failed on so many levels. Explain the failures by the FBI and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, so that the new solutions don’t fail, too.

On Jan. 5, someone familiar with Nikolas Cruz had the presence of mind to call the FBI’s Public Access Line to say she feared he might “get into a school and shoot the place up.” That tip wasn’t forwarded to the FBI’s office in Miami. Two other recent callers to the Broward police—which got 23 calls about Cruz’s behavior back to 2008—also warned he could become a school shooter.

Here are the official explanations.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions: “I have ordered the deputy attorney general to conduct an immediate review.” FBI Director Christopher Wray : “I am committed to getting to the bottom of what happened in this particular matter, as well as reviewing our processes.”

FBI Special Agent Robert Lasky: “We will conduct an in-depth review.” Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel : “This isn’t science fiction. We aren’t allowed to arrest on what a person thinks about on pre-crimes.”

Florida already has a law, the Baker Act, permitting forced hospitalization for psychiatric examination. In 2016 mental-health workers were called to the high school to determine if Cruz should be hospitalized. They concluded he was stable. NBC reported that the Florida Department of Children and Families investigation of Cruz was “closed with no indicators to support the allegations of inadequate supervision or medical neglect.”

Finally, the armed sheriff’s deputy assigned to protect the high school failed to confront the shooter, instead staying outside the building.

Now come new solutions. Senator John Cornyn’s legislation would fix the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which has existed since 1998 but works poorly. Florida Governor Rick Scott wants to raise the legal age for purchasing a gun to 21. President Trump on Thursday tweeted his to-do list: comprehensive background checks with an emphasis on mental health, raising the gun-purchase age and banning bump stocks.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

U.S.’s Jerusalem Embassy to Open in May, Could Get Adelson Funds Casino magnate and GOP donor has offered to help pay for a new facility after initial personnel move By Felicia Schwartz

By on February 24th, 2018

WASHINGTON—The State Department will open its embassy in Jerusalem in May and is entertaining an unusual offer from Sheldon Adelson, Republican Party donor and casino magnate, to help pay for a new facility after an initial move from Tel Aviv, U.S. officials said.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson late Thursday signed off on security plans for converting a consular facility in Jerusalem’s Arnona neighborhood. Officials said they are eyeing a ribbon-cutting ceremony on May 14 to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel’s declaring independence.

“We are excited about taking this historic step, and look forward with anticipation to the May opening,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said.

At first, David Friedman, U.S. ambassador to Israel, and a small group of aides will begin working from the facility. Next, the State Department will begin retrofitting that complex to accommodate more officials, and the department has begun efforts to plan and locate a site for a new embassy facility in Jerusalem. Mr. Adelson has offered to contribute to the effort to build a new embassy, but the discussions are informal so far.

State Department officials are examining whether the U.S. could accept such a gift. Mr. Adelson’s offer was earlier reported by the Associated Press. A representative to Mr. Adelson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a speech before Israel’s legislature on Monday, Vice President Mike Pence said the U.S. embassy will be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by the end of 2019, ahead of schedule. Photo: AP (Originally published Jan. 22, 2018)

Mr. Adelson has also engaged with President Donald Trump and his administration on acquiring land for the construction of a new embassy in Jerusalem, according to a person familiar with the matter. State Department officials said that process could take at least five to seven years.

The embassy move and Mr. Adelson’s unconventional offer come amid an effort by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Mr. Trump’s chief negotiator, Jason Greenblatt, to try to restart the Middle East peace process between Israel and Palestinians. The offer of Mr. Adelson’s gift could complicate those efforts as Mr. Adelson is a staunch supporter of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and funds Israel Hayom, a pro-Netanyahu newspaper in Israel.

At the United Nations this week, diplomats pressed Messrs. Kushner and Greenblatt on whether their plan would be biased toward Israel. They responded that they have spent months meeting with Palestinians, Israelis and others in the region to ensure evenhandedness. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Humanitarian Hoax of Multiple Realities: Killing America With Kindness – hoax 23 by Linda Goudsmit

By on February 24th, 2018

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The ideological strivings of our Founding Fathers were rooted in freedom, liberty, limited government, and the separation of church and state. They sought to create a more perfect union – a society of individuals cooperating by mutual consent. Psychiatrist Lyle Rossiter’s stunning book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness details America’s extraordinary achievement of ordered liberty, how its infrastructure complements the nature of man, and how the collectivist liberal narrative is pathologically antithetical to ordered liberty.

The ideological moorings of ordered liberty require consensus on what is real. This is no small thing. Language is based on consensus of what is real. Laws are based on consensus of what is real. Without agreement on what is real there is no societal order only chaos.

Senator Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.” Well said. Opinions are based in the subjective reality of feelings, facts are based in the objective reality of actuality. Feelings are not facts.

This is worth repeating – objective reality is defined by facts and subjective reality is defined by feelings. The Leftist Culture War on America is attacking the ideological strivings and ideological moorings of ordered liberty by attacking its most basic requirement – consensus on what is real. The left-wing liberal attack strategy seeks to replace factual objective reality with subjective multiple realities based on feelings. This is how it works.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Hard-Line Supporter of Israel Offers to Pay for U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem By Gardiner Harris and Isabel Kershner

By on February 24th, 2018

WASHINGTON — Sheldon G. Adelson, one of the most hawkish supporters of Israel among American Jews, has offered to help fund the construction of a new American Embassy in Jerusalem, according to the State Department, which on Friday said it was reviewing whether it could legally accept the donation.

The total price tag to build the new embassy to replace the current one in Tel Aviv is estimated at around $500 million, according to one former State Department official. While private donors have previously paid for renovations to American ambassadors’ overseas residences, Mr. Adelson’s contribution would be likely to far surpass those gifts — and could further strain American diplomacy in the Middle East.

Before the embassy is built, the Trump administration plans to open a temporary one in Jerusalem. On Friday, it said that it was accelerating the projected opening in time to mark the 70th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel on May 14.

Even some of Mr. Adelson’s allies expressed concern that if the administration accepts his offer for the permanent embassy, it could be seen as a well-heeled financial contributor effectively privatizing — and politicizing — American foreign policy.

Mr. Adelson, who has been a vocal supporter of the contentious plan to move the embassy, is not merely a philanthropist; he is one of the most prominent players in Israeli-American relations. He is a conservative force in American politics, a donor to President Trump, a longtime patron of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the owner of Israel’s largest-circulation daily newspaper.

“I’m concerned that people will think that this is being done because of a group of people — evangelicals and Jews — who care about it and not because it’s the U.S. government that cares about it,” said Morton A. Klein, who runs the Zionist Organization of America, a nonprofit group that is funded partly by Mr. Adelson. “It should be crystal-clear that this is the U.S. government making the decision to move it.”

Through a representative, Mr. Adelson declined to comment on Friday. His offer of a donation was first reported by The Associated Press.

Steve Goldstein, the under secretary for public diplomacy, said State Department lawyers began looking several weeks ago at whether it was legal to accept a private donation to build an embassy, a process that continues. He said the department was not currently negotiating with any private citizen for a donation, and that a new embassy building would take seven to 10 years to construct.

It was not clear whether private donors had ever helped with the financial costs to build an American embassy. Patrick Kennedy, who last year retired from the State Department, where he served as under secretary for management, said donors in the past had contributed millions of dollars to refurbish the palatial United States ambassadors’ residences in London, Paris, Rome and Tokyo.

“As long as a donor passes an ethics and background check, we’ll take their money if they’re willing to give it. There’s no problem there,” Mr. Kennedy said in an interview on Friday.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Yet another way Obama’s spies apparently exploited the Trump ‘dossier’ by Paul Sperry

By on February 24th, 2018

The much-hyped Obama intelligence report that determined “Vladimir Putin ordered” Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails hacked and leaked “to help Trump’s chances of victory” has been accepted as gospel among DC punditry and given the investigations besieging the Trump presidency their legs. To date, no evidence has publicly emerged to corroborate the report, and the reason may have a lot to do with that sketchy dossier bought and paid for by Clinton.

Suspiciously, Barack Obama’s Intelligence Community Assessment matches the main allegations leveled by the Clinton-paid dossier on Trump, which wormed its way into intelligence channels, in addition to the FBI, Justice Department and State Department, during the 2016 campaign.

In fact, the shady dossier makes exactly the same claim — that Putin personally “ordered” the cyberattacks on the Clinton campaign and leaked embarrassing emails to “bolster Trump,” as part of “an aggressive Trump support operation.” Like Obama’s ICA, Clinton’s dossier provides no concrete evidence to back up the claim.

After learning Obama Justice and FBI officials relied heavily on unsubstantiated rumors in the dossier to wiretap a Trump adviser during the election, congressional leaders now suspect the dossier also informed Obama intelligence officials who compiled the ICA.

The report was released Jan. 6, 2017 — the same day intelligence officials attached a written summary of the dossier to a highly classified Russia briefing they gave Obama about the dossier, and the day after Obama held a secret White House meeting to discuss the dossier with his national security adviser and FBI director.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Bibi: “The Israeli Intelligence Services Thwarted the Downing of an Australian Plane”

By on February 23rd, 2018

“The Israeli intelligence services thwarted the downing of an Australian plane, an unimaginable slaughter. This would have caused a major disruption in global air transport and this is only one of dozens of terrorist attacks we have foiled around the world. I think that Israeli intelligence must be thanked for protecting not only Israelis but many civilians around the world.”

That’s what Binyamin Netanyahu has revealed today.

To quote the Sydney Morning Herald (one of the Fairfax stable of Aussie newspapers, not known for their love of Israel):

‘His comments, during a speech in Jerusalem to US Jewish leaders, followed a statement from the Israeli army that a branch of military intelligence known as “Unit 8200” had foiled an “aerial attack abroad by Islamic State”.

Israeli media said the army statement referred to an attempted bombing in July of an Etihad Airways flight due to leave Sydney for Abu Dhabi, which was foiled by Australian security forces before the plane took off.

An Australian man had sent his brother to Sydney Airport to catch the flight carrying a home-made bomb disguised as a meat-mincer, built at the direction of a senior Islamic State commander, Australian police said.

He caught the flight without his checked baggage after it was rejected at a Sydney Airport check-in counter because it was too heavy.

He then travelled to Lebanon, the Lebanese interior minister said.

Days after the alleged plot was revealed, Lebanon’s interior minister said Beirut had monitored the brothers for more than a year and had worked with Australian authorities to disrupt the attack.

A number of men were arrested in raids across Sydney last July relating to the alleged plot.

Two have been charged with acting in preparation for, or planning, a terrorist act.’

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Stephen H. Balch Race, Gender, Class: One Doesn’t Belong

By on February 23rd, 2018

Promoting the deconstruction of gender roles, as modern feminism urges, works to divorce women from their intrinsic natures—a very unhappy outcome. Worst of all, it creates one more wedge issue suitable for the further aggrandisement of government power.

In December 2016 a special episode of the BBC hit Sherlock reprised in cinemaplexes across the United States. “The Abominable Bride” had had its silver-screen debut eleven months earlier, but popular appeal induced the distributor Fathom Events to bring it back. Although primarily designed for Sherlock’s fan base, the show’s defining conceit, Holmes and Watson in modern dress, was suspended. Instead, the plot warped back to the London of Arthur Conan Doyle, where a succession of cads and bounders have been murdered by what seems a vengeful female ghost. Initially stumped, Sherlock consults his brother, Mycroft, who enigmatically confides that the perpetrators compose an invisible army, found everywhere, who cannot be resisted because “they are right”. Thus guided, Holmes eventually discovers a congregation of hooded feminists in a ruined abbey, plotting the murder of their nastiest victimisers. The drama never quite concludes—it’s but a drugged fantasy of the modern Holmes interrupted by anxious friends—yet there’s no doubt of the heroic status of the homicidal assembly. They’re true social justice warriors, if a bit avant la lettre.

While it never is, or has to be, made explicit, the episode’s moral premise, one that now saturates Western consciousness, is that women rate among the great victims of human history. Certainly none in the audience I joined seemed at all uncomfortable with it. And why should they be? It’s the core message of contemporary feminism, affirmed by politicians, the media and, most especially, our socially engaged professoriate. The latter, in fact, have “theorised” it in the now fabled formula of “race, gender and class”. Settled wisdom in the university, and holy writ for women’s studies, the formula is meant to link women with serfs, slaves and other forms of immiserated labour. Off-campus progressives embrace the equivalence as well—the unity and moral authority of their victims’ coalition demanding no less. Without it the recurrent political trope of a “war on women” would appear as risible as that of a war on cat fanciers.

So, is the formula valid?

Clearly not—at least if one is willing to use evolution’s scorecard in assessing winners and losers. Evolution’s bottom line is reproductive success, how many offspring are produced and, of these, how many themselves survive to reproduction. Prospectively it determines the size of an individual’s contribution to future gene pools. Retrospectively it suggests the degree of wellbeing an individual has likely experienced—wellbeing having much to do with succeeding at what comes naturally.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

DEFENDING THE RULE OF LAW The dire consequences for Israeli democracy if Netanyahu is forced from office. Caroline Glick

By on February 23rd, 2018

Israel’s system of democracy has been under assault for more than two decades. Since the early 1990s, elected officials have fought a losing battle to maintain their power. The legal fraternity and the police, acting with the enthusiastic support and often at the urging of the politically biased media, have seized politicians’ governing prerogatives and powers one by one. These actions have all been justified in the name of the rule of law.

Today, Israel’s democracy – that is, the ability of the nation to determine its course through the election of representatives that share their convictions – is threatened as never before.

Almost exactly 21 years ago, elected officials lost their most important battle to date. On January 10, 1997, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first government approved the appointment of Ronnie Bar-On to serve as attorney-general. Bar-On was a private attorney in Jerusalem. He chaired the Beitar soccer organization in the capital and his was a close friend and former mentor of then-justice minister Tzachi Hanegbi who did his legal clerkship in Bar-On’s office.

The government’s announcement that Bar-On would serve as attorney-general was viciously criticized by the media and Israel’s legal elite. Much of the criticism was rank snobbery. Bar-On was not a member of the club. He had not served as a prosecutor. He was not a law professor. He was just a good lawyer with friendly ties to Hanegbi. How dare the government appoint him?

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

#MeToo in the Mosque by Giulio Meotti

By on February 23rd, 2018

“While the brave Iranian women protested against hijab laws, Western feminists celebrated hijab”. — Rita Panahi, Herald Sun, Australia.

Instead of a celebration of Islamist discrimination against women, the West should promote a #MeToo in the mosque, the idea of an Egyptian, Mona Eltahawi. She would like to raise the issue of rape and sexual abuse suffered by Muslim women during the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Will the Western advocates of women’s rights also stand for the rights of Muslim women, or, in the name of “multiculturalism”, the will they keep appeasing those who persecute them instead?

While the march for women’s rights in Washington this year took place under the banner of #MeToo against sexual harassment, in Iran dozens of women were taking to the streets to protest against theocracy and compulsory wearing of the hijab. The Iranian women waved white flags to fight against the mullahs’ obligation to veil. But the white flag was not a surrender; it was apparently a symbol of Western feminists. As the Australian Rita Panahi wrote, “while the brave Iranian women protested against hijab laws, Western feminists celebrated hijab”.

On February 1, many of these Iranian women were arrested for not wearing a hijab. On that very day, the World Hijab Day was celebrated in the West, and Western appeasers celebrated the veil. Even British PM Theresa May backed the claim that women should be “free” to wear hijab. A few days after that, the American department store Macy’s decided to sell the hijab as an item of fashion clothing. Unfortunately, in some Islamic countries, women are not “free” to wear the veil; they are obliged to wear the veil, as the arrests in Iran show us.

Instead of a celebration of Islamist discrimination against women, the West should promote a #MeToo in the mosque — the idea of an Egyptian, Mona Eltahawi. She would like to raise the issue of rape and sexual abuse suffered by Muslim women during the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The State Submits by Mark Steyn Steyn on Britain

By on February 23rd, 2018

I’ve written many times over the last decade and a half about that rare bird the “moderate Muslim”. Surely one reason for his scarceness is that, whenever he pops his head above the parapet, he’s hung out to dry by craven infidel politicians and bureaucrats, who on the whole find the admirably straightforward demands of your average firebreathing imam more congenial. Hence the pandering to returning Isis warriors: Mods vs Raqqa’s – it’s no contest.

The latest examples are the headmistress and chairman of the board of governors of St Stephen’s Primary School in Newham, East London. St Stephen, you’ll recall, was the first Christian martyr, but observant Christians are thinner on the ground in today’s Newham than they were in first-century Jerusalem. So St Stephen’s School today is mostly Muslim. Nevertheless:

In June last year, [headmistress Neena] Lall removed the hijab from the school uniform for girls aged seven and under and tried to curb young children from fasting at school in case they became unwell.

Good for her. Hijabs for under-sevens? If you’re in most Muslim countries, you notice that the gals don’t disappear under the veil until puberty: Covered kindergartners is largely a western phenomenon.

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