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Ruth King

ISRAEL Comments turned off

How Palestinians Silence Palestinians by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on December 30th, 2017

Mohammed Al-Dayeh has been under interrogation on suspicion of establishing and managing two Facebook pages — “Sons of the Martyrs” and “No to Corruption.” The Palestinian Authority claims that both accounts were used to wage a smear campaign against top Palestinian officials and accuse them of financial and administrative corruption.

There is only one small problem regarding the charges against Al-Dayeh: The man cannot read or write, and as such there is no way he could have posted the offensive remarks on Facebook.

This is about how Palestinian leaders continue to march their people towards yet more harm and grief. This is also about the ongoing failure of the international community to note any of the above.

Most people probably do not know him by name, but the image of Mohammed Al-Dayeh was a public one for many years. The tough-looking, mustachioed man in military garb served as the trusted bodyguard of former PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

His proximity to Arafat turned Al-Dayeh into one of the most powerful figures in the PLO leadership, especially during the 1990s and 2000s. If you wanted anything from Arafat — from money to springing your son from prison — Al-Dayeh was your man.

He was glued to Arafat night and day. He accompanied him on his persistent globe-trotting. You can hardly find a photo of Arafat without Al-Dayeh. Insiders say Arafat “adopted” him after he was orphaned from his parents during the civil war in Lebanon.

Al-Dayeh’s fall from grace was rapid once his boss, Arafat, died in 2004. This is typical for dictatorial regimes that are run as a one-man show. Arafat managed the Palestinian Authority (and PLO) as if it were his private fiefdom. When the emperor falls, so do many of those around him, particularly his personal picks.

In the past week, Palestinians were surprised to learn that the man who was an icon of power of the Arafat era was now being held in detention in a Palestinian Authority prison in Ramallah. Reports about the incarceration of Al-Dayeh first appeared on social media, and many Palestinians were convinced that these were just rumors and gossip. How could the man once so loved by Arafat be behind bars? What crime did Al-Dayeh, who holds the rank of “brigadier-general” in the Palestinian Authority, commit? It would have to have been quite a misstep on Al-Dayeh’s part.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

2017 Was Trump’s Year of Winning Dangerously Despite fake controversies and his own impulsiveness, he won real victories for America and its citizens. By Deroy Murdock

By on December 30th, 2017

For President Donald J. Trump, 2017 concludes unlike the way it commenced.

His commanding inaugural address soon became swamped by an enervating debate over the size of the crowd that had witnessed it. That national screaming match foreshadowed other huge distractions, including court battles concerning Trump’s travel restrictions on terror-torn nations, a Niagara Falls of classified leaks, and loud threats of impeachment over alleged Russian collusion. Meanwhile, repealing and replacing Obamacare, expected to take just a few months, devolved into a quagmire that devoured time, energy, and morale.

But 2017 ends as Trump’s Year of Winning Dangerously. The President of the United States has navigated these and other troubled waters and defied his critics — from Resist on the left to Never Trump on the right. As he puts it: “We are compiling a long and beautiful list” of achievements.

As Trump and Republicans gathered at the White House to celebrate passage of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act with overwhelming GOP support, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell announced: “This has been a year of extraordinary accomplishments for the Trump administration.”

While free traders and entitlement reformers could ask for more, nearly all of Trump’s triumphs are solidly conservative victories. Indeed, Trump has implemented policies over which the Right has fantasized for years, sometimes decades.

The $1.5 trillion Tax Cut and Jobs Act is the most significant tax-policy overhaul since 1986. On January 1, these conservative dreams will come true: a massive slash in the corporate tax (from a 35 percent rate to 21, thus reducing the business levy by 40 percent), repatriation of overseas profits, a territorial tax system, and immediate expensing of capital investments.

Beyond taxes, per se, TCJA also secures free-market priorities in energy, health care, and school choice.

TCJA permits petroleum development in 2,000 acres of the 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. While leaving literally 99.99 percent of ANWR untouched, the 0.01 percent available for drilling could yield up to 1.45 million barrels of oil daily, equal to 14.5 percent of current domestic production. The GOP has tried to unlock ANWR since 1979.

TCJA makes enrollment in Obamacare voluntary by scrapping the individual-coverage mandate. Those who want Obamacare may keep it, but never again will anyone be penalized for rejecting Obamacare. While this will not kill Obama’s disastrous monstrosity immediately, it shoves a shiv between its ribs. This is the GOP’s greatest progress in snuffing out Obamacare since 2010.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

How the Trump Administration Can Hold the U.N. Accountable Again Fred Fleitz

By on December 30th, 2017

President Trump and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley made a lot of news last week with their condemnations of the United Nations over a U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) resolution criticizing President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the U.S. embassy there.

President Trump threatened to withhold billions of dollars in U.S. aid from states that voted for the resolution and said after the vote, “Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care.” Ambassador Haley warned that the U.S. would be “taking names” of states that voted for this resolution.

Although these comments didn’t represent anything new — U.S. officials have lamented the U.N.’s anti-Israel and anti-U.S. bias for decades — they were still very significant, since they involve the United States’ holding the United Nations accountable again after a 25-year hiatus.

As a CIA U.N. analyst from 1986 to 1994, I remember well the intense focus by the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations to punish U.N. members who voted for anti-U.S. and anti-Israel resolutions. Nations were given scores on their support of the United States in the U.N., which were used to determine U.S. aid.

For example, in 1990, after Yemen voted against a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq in response to its invasion of Kuwait, Secretary of State James Baker told Yemen’s U.N. ambassador, “That was the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever cast.” Several days later, a $70 million U.S. aid program to Yemen was halted.

There also was a push during this period to curtail the use of the U.N. for espionage against the United States by hostile powers, especially the Soviet Union. In addition, U.S. diplomats fought to lower the U.S. contribution to the U.N. and to address the organization’s epic corruption and inefficiency.

In 1991, then–assistant secretary of state John Bolton scored a huge win against anti-Semitism and animus toward Israel in the U.N. with his successful campaign to persuade the U.N. General Assembly to rescind its odious 1975 resolution that equated Zionism with racism.

While I was providing intelligence support to Bolton for his campaign to rescind the U.N. Zionism/racism resolution, I learned that his main challenge was not twisting the arms of foreign leaders; it was fighting with State Department careerists who did not want to upset Arab countries and seemed to have their own biases against the Jewish state. This problem continues today, and it is why President Trump must fill vacant State Department positions ASAP with people who will defend his policies.

This twelve-year campaign against U.N. bias and mismanagement by two Republican administrations ended with the Clinton administration, which took a “see no evil” approach to the U.N. and adopted a policy called “assertive multilateralism,” which tried to end civil wars with U.N. peacekeeping and used U.S. soldiers as peacekeepers. I explained in my 2002 book Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s how this policy led to a string of major peacekeeping failures in the former Yugoslavia, Haiti, and Somalia.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Time to Give Clinton’s Server Technician the Mueller Treatment The Trump Justice Department should reopen the investigation of Paul Combetta. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on December 30th, 2017

New Year’s Eve gets people thinking about resolutions. Alas, when a year passes, a mothballed prosecutor finds himself thinking about the statute of limitations. As 2018 beckons, it has me thinking about Paul Combetta — the Platte River Networks technician who used the “BleachBit” program to destroy thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails when they were under congressional subpoena and preservation orders.

It is not just the tick-tock of the criminal clock that has me thinking about Combetta — about how much longer his obstructive destruction of government files in March 2015 could still be subject to investigation and prosecution. The statute of limitations is five years. Time’s a-wastin’, but there could still be a live case for a while.

The other reason Combetta leaps to the front of the mind is . . . Robert Mueller.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein assures us that Special Counsel Mueller is doing a first-rate job probing the possible (but thus far undiscovered) complicity of Trump associates in Russia’s election meddling. That being the case, I’m wondering: Would the Trump Justice Department be up for applying Mueller’s approach to the Clinton caper?

No, I’m not suggesting that DOJ direct the FBI to break into Mr. Combetta’s home with guns drawn in the dead of night, as Mueller did with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. I’d save the brass-knuckles tactics for hardened criminals, as the law intends. I’m talking about the aggressive but wholly legitimate step Mueller has taken: Calling BS on attempts by criminal suspects to use lawyers to conceal their schemes.

Back in November, we catalogued the stark contrasts between Mueller’s brand of hardball and the kid-gloves treatment given to subjects of the Clinton-emails investigation. The most significant of these involved the attorney–client privilege. Mueller persuaded a federal judge to force an attorney for Manafort and his co-defendant (Richard Gates) to testify against them in the grand jury.

Naturally, the defense attempted to rely on the attorney–client privilege to shield communications between the lawyer and the suspects from disclosure. But Mueller successfully countered that, under the crime-fraud exception to that privilege, communications are not deemed confidential if they are in furtherance of a crime, fraud, or civil wrong — which includes a scheme to dupe the government or undermine an investigation.

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2017: A Year Of Success And Achievement For The IDF From technological breakthroughs to operational successes, the IDF shows why it’s at the top of the food chain. December 29, 2017 Ari Lieberman

By on December 30th, 2017

2017 was a busy year for the Israel Defense Forces. There were threats emanating from both north and south, above and below ground, from state and non-state actors. There is of course, always room for improvement but the IDF can reflect on the past year with satisfaction in the knowledge that it protected its citizens from genocidal threats and improved its tactical and strategic capabilities by successful integration of new, technologically advanced weapon systems. Let us review some of these achievements with the caveat that there are some successes that are understandably not talked about in open circles or shared with the general public.

Gaza Tunnels – Israel has always been cognizant of the challenges posed by tunnels dug by Hamas terrorists or its affiliates but its recognition of the emerging threat came to sharper focus with Operation Protective Edge in 2014. During that operation, the IDF uncovered and destroyed some 34 tunnels. The 2014 Gaza war forced Hamas to prematurely reveal its hand. Had the war not broken out when it did, it is probable that at some later date Hamas would have carried out a mega attack in Israeli territory involving mass murder and kidnapping. The war pre-empted Hamas’s plans. The tunnel challenge compelled Israel to invest more resources in developing technologies to counter the threat and that investment is paying dividends. This past year, Israel caused a number of tunnels in the midst of construction to collapse. In December, the IDF destroyed a Hamas tunnel that it had been monitoring. In October, the IDF destroyed a tunnel belonging to the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad, killing 12 PIJ and 2 Hamas operatives. In the meantime, Israel is in the midst of constructing an anti-tunnel barrier equipped with sophisticated sensors. As the work progresses, the IDF expects to uncover more tunnels.

Iron Dome – Since the conclusion of Operation Protective Edge, Hamas has been wary of firing rockets into Israel for fear of Israeli retaliation. However, following America’s surprise recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Hamas turned a blind eye toward the nefarious actions of other Gaza-based Islamist groups and failed to prevent them from firing rockets. Iron Dome once again proved its mettle intercepting a number of rockets, downing only those rockets determined to have the most menacing trajectories. In November, the Israeli Navy announced the deployment of the Iron Dome system on its sea platforms. The Israeli Navy is tasked with protecting Israel’s vast sea lanes and offshore gas platforms. Iron Dome will significantly enhance the Navy’s ability to perform this vital role.

F-35 Adir – Israel has taken delivery of the F-35 stealth fighter-bomber, the first air force outside of the U.S. Air Force to do so. Israel currently operates nine of these 5th generation fighters and plans to acquire a total of 50. The plane is already believed to have been put to operational use. Some have criticized its prohibitive cost but the aircraft’s stealth characteristics and sophisticated avionics ensure that both plane and pilot will survive even in the most challenging of circumstances thus justifying the cost. There is currently nothing in the world that matches the F-35 in terms of the plane’s advanced technological features and stealth characteristics. The Russians and Chinese are at least eight years behind in this regard.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

HIP, HIP HOORAY HAPPY ABORTION DAY

By on December 30th, 2017

In South Korea, Japan, China and other spots around the globe, universities are training students in the skills needed to drive their nations’ economies. Here in Australia, young minds are being immersed in the likes of Adelaide University’s Dr Erica Millar’s crusade to make abortions happy and festive affairs. As her university profile explains, sort of (emphasis added):

Erica’s research expertise is in the sociology and cultural politics of reproduction. She is interested in representations of reproduction, systems of stratified reproduction, reproductive justice movements, and biopolitics. Erica’s most recent research is on the cultural politics of abortion. Her project combines feminist theory with theories of emotion, neoliberal governmentality, critical race studies and biopolitics to examine how the decisions women make about their pregnancies are regulated in the late modern era. She is especially concerned with identifying, theorising, and historicising the emotions that circulate alongside representations of abortion, including maternal happiness, abortion shame, and foetocentric grief. She has published several articles on the topic and her monograph Happy Abortions: Our Bodies in the Era of Choice has recently been published by Zed Books.

As to Ms Millar’s hope that abortions will come to be seen as moments of joy, she’s deadly serious:

…the idea that abortion could or should be a happy experience for women is virtually unrepresentable in the current socio-political landscape. Instead, an array of negative emotions—particularly grief, shame, regret and distress—dominate the representational terrain of abortion.

The emotions of abortion contrast sharply with the position motherhood occupies as the unassailable placeholder for women’s happiness. Erica Millar explains how cultural and political forces continue to circumscribe the decisions women make about their pregnancies, forces that are commonly disguised under the rhetoric of choice. In doing so, she provides an account of how women’s freedom is constrained in the neoliberal era of choice.

The various blurbs and reviews for Ms Millar’s book may be read at Amazon, available via this link or the one below. Her groundbreaking work on Anxious White Nationalism and the Biopolitics of Abortion will also be appreciated by those seeking a greater understanding of our universities and how they came to be as they are. A sample:

…a history of maternal citizenship for white women, which reverberates in the present, and the articulation of the desire to eradicate abortion (amongst white women) alongside other key biopolitical technologies—the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty and the exclusion of non-white immigrants from the nation. The figure of the aborting woman thus stands alongside other bodies perceived as threats to white sociocultural hegemony in Australia and one of its key institutions—the white, hetero-family. In the 1970s, such figures included the communist, the divorcee and the (non-white) immigrant, and in the 2000s, the lesbian mother, the single mother and the boatperson.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Special Prosecutor Should Probe Democrats’ Malfeasance By Nicholas L. Waddy

By on December 30th, 2017

When the 2016 presidential election ended, the media somehow found the time to expose one of the greatest scandals of that or any other election cycle: active efforts of the Democratic National Committee favoring Hillary Clinton’s nomination and undermining the campaign of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Now it appears that former interim DNC Chairman Donna Brazile’s revelations about her party’s interference in the primaries may only have been a small taste of what really happened. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee may also have been part of a broad effort to undermine Trump that involved the FBI, the Department of Justice, intelligence agencies, and—irony of ironies!—Russian spies. This anti-Trump cabal has escaped public notice almost entirely, given the media’s obsession with the transparently false narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.

This is all the more reason why Attorney General Jeff Sessions needs to shine a light on this outrageous and potentially criminal conduct.

Although there are many indicators of election meddling on the part of the Left, the most important is the existence of the so-called Steele Dossier, a compilation of unflattering facts, pseudo-facts, and blatant fabrications designed to undermine the Presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The dossier was the work of British spy-for-hire Christopher Steele, paid for initially by anti-Trump conservatives. Later, the DNC and the Clinton campaign bankrolled Steele’s efforts, and the dossier, to the tune of millions of dollars. The dossier was shopped around to various media outlets, which, to their credit, mostly scoffed at its contents.

The FBI, however, took the dossier seriously enough to use it to begin an investigation of the Trump campaign and to obtain a warrant against Trump associate Carter Page. The FBI even offered to pay Steele to continue his work. And from where did the most salacious and bogus claims in the dossier come? Russian spies supplied these tidbits, in exchange for cash from Steele, who ultimately received funding from Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

Now, opposition research is perfectly legitimate. Paying the agents of a foreign state to reveal and/or concoct damaging information about one’s political adversary, however, is manifestly unethical, and it remains an open question whether the Democrats or the Clinton campaign committed crimes in the course of their effort to discredit and defeat Trump. That the party which engaged in this outrageous behavior would then turn around and baselessly accuse its opponents of doing the same thing is, well, breathtaking in its audacity.

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ROGER KIMBALL: TAKING TRUMP SERIOUSLY

By on December 30th, 2017

Trying to take Trump seriously, Michael’s Barone’s column in the Washington Examiner on Thursday, is significant for at least two reasons. One is that anything Barone writes is certain to be thoughtful, authoritatively researched, and grounded in reality. His columns, like his work in general, are not fired mainly by ideology but by a desire to understand. What Cardinal Newman said of Aristotle could, mutatis mutandis, be said of Barone: about most things, to think like him is to think correctly.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/29/taking-trump-seriously/

But there is another sense in which this particular column is significant. Given Barone’s stature as a conservative but non-ideological commentator, his judicious and fair-minded assessment may mark a turning point in the broader public reception of President Trump’s initiatives.

Remember: the moment that Donald Trump achieved the impossible, defeating the anointed candidate Hillary Clinton, a vast coalition formed like a toxic mold to blight his presidency and deny him the legitimacy that he had won at the ballot box and the Electoral College.

Irony-free females in pink “pussy hats” marched in their thousands to protest against Trump’s “vulgarity”; B-list Hollywood narcissists made embarrassing videos in which they pleaded with members of the Electoral College to renege on their responsibility to vote for their party’s candidate; frenzied commentators at CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other outposts of woke hysteria regurgitated rumors, fantasies, innuendos, and gossip on the basis of “sources” indistinguishable from their personal political animus; black-masked members of Antifa and kindred covens of criminal disgruntlement rampaged on college campuses, destroying property and injuring people with whom they disagreed in order to protest the violence and intolerance of Donald Trump; the entire academic establishment, that sprawling congeries of preening though unearned smugness and moral self-infatuation, contracted in one brow of hate-spewing woe to demonstrate its unwavering commitment to sclerotic ideological conformity.

“The Embarrassing Ravings of a Mad Uncle”
All across the fruited plain, pampered members of the entitled class shouted at others to “check their privilege” while signaling their approval of a “resistance” movement whose only reality was a resistance to the results of a free, open, and democratic election. On the one hand, it was a perfect illustration of what Charles Mackay called “the madness of crowds”; on the other, it was a vivid embodiment of something Sigmund Freud might have congregated under the heading of “infantile neurosis.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

White Privilege: An Article of Left-Wing Faith By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on December 30th, 2017

In Yiddish, the term dreck means excrement, dung, crap, or worthless junk. It is an apt term for the deliberate psychological damage being inflicted upon young Americans as they navigate the leftist swamp of higher education.

White privilege, or whiteness studies, is now an entrenched part of far too many -ology and humanities classes. This notion of white skin privilege has become an “article of faith among progressives,” who assert that “whites, by definition and DNA, would remain racists, even if unwittingly, until the end of time.”

Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, describes “white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets[.] White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks” (McIntosh, 1989). She distributes the following, and students are asked to mark those that apply. A few of the items include:

I can arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
When I am told about our national heritage or about civilization, I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the food I grew up with, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can deal with my hair.
Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial responsibility.
I can take a job or enroll in a college with an affirmative action policy without having my co-workers or peers assume I got it because of my race.
I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated.
I am never asked to speak for all of the people of my racial group.
I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk with the person in charge[,] I will be facing a person of my race.
If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
I can easily see posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
I can choose blemish cover or bandages in flesh color and have them more or less match my skin.
I can walk into a classroom and know I will not be the only member of my race.
I can enroll in a class at college and be sure that the majority of my professors will be of my race.

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Social Justice Warriors Melt Down Over New York Times Chopsticks Photo By John Ellis

By on December 30th, 2017

One of the nice things about being a writer in 2018 is that SJWs will continue to find new and absurd ways to get their feelings hurt. Even if nothing else is happening, I can always count on a group of SJWs providing me with something to write about. This time, a horde of them provided me a gift by taking to Twitter to express their dismay at a photo of chopsticks accompanying a New York Times story about a new Japanese restaurant.

The restaurant, called Jade Sixty, will be opening in NYC soon. The Times article reports that “a good portion of the menu at this new restaurant is pure New York steakhouse: nine cuts of beef, surf & turf, whole chicken and seafood platters. But the rest of the menu looks to Asia for inspiration, offering soup dumplings, chicken won tons, rock shrimp tempura, chicken yakitori, crispy spring rolls and a deep list of sushi specialties.”

Sounds delicious. And since my wife has an office in NYC, I look forward to sampling the menu.

In an attempt to help the soon-to-open restaurant spread the word, the New York Times included a photo of food accompanied by chopsticks. Apparently, the Times didn’t realize how important it is to get the chopsticks placement correct. They found out the hard way that the incorrect placement of chopsticks is racist. To be fair to the Times, I would bet that over 99.9 percent of the population wouldn’t have thought about it, either.

Predictably, HuffPost joined in the whining and smugly pointed out that “the chopstick photo is a reminder that the Times has been occasionally tone deaf towards Asian food and culture despite their ubiquity in New York City.”

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