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Ruth King

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Egypt’s Al-Azhar University: Moderation or Dissimulation? by A. Z. Mohamed

By on January 10th, 2018

While Al-Azhar’s informational campaign aims to promote “moderate” Islam, reinforce the values of citizenship and coexistence among Egyptians, and counter “deviant fatwas,” a recent study reveals that senior officials at Al-Azhar are still defending and promoting school curricula that contradict tolerance and acceptance of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority.

Al-Azhar officials, it turned out, removed the proposed content encouraging tolerance and acceptance of Christians from the school curricula, and the official who proposed that curricular “reform” was fired.

Why are Al-Azhar’s leaders not fully cooperating with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi? Factors include their extremist Islamic faith, and uncertainty regarding their public image and their popularity if they yield to Sisi’s demands. These reservations seem especially charged in the context of rivalries for religious leadership in Egypt, and signs of support for Al Azhar from the parliament, the media and the public. Possibly even more persuasive is the fear of gradually losing all power and the ability to use taqiyyah when needed if they yield to Sisi’s demands.

Al-Azhar University seemed to have either an ambivalent attitude or a two-faced, taqiyah [dissimulation] one regarding tolerance towards Christians in particular and Islamic moderation in general, according to a report, “Two Faces Of Egypt’s Al-Azhar: Promoting Goodwill, Tolerance Towards Christians In Informational Holiday Campaign – But Refusing To Do The Same In Its School Curricula,” disclosed by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

While Al-Azhar’s informational campaign, “Sharing the Homeland,” aims to promote “moderate” Islam, reinforce the values of citizenship and coexistence among Egyptians, and counter “deviant fatwas,” a recent study published in El-Watan News reveals that senior officials at Al-Azhar are still defending and promoting school curricula that contradict tolerance and acceptance of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. Al-Azhar officials, it turned out, removed the proposed content encouraging tolerance and acceptance of Christians from the school curricula, and the official who proposed that curricular “reform” was fired.

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Dirty College Secrets A record-breaking year for campus insanity. January 10, 2018 Walter Williams

By on January 10th, 2018

A frequent point I have made in past columns has been about the educational travesty happening on many college campuses. Some people have labeled my observations and concerns as trivial, unimportant and cherry-picking. While the spring semester awaits us, let’s ask ourselves whether we’d like to see repeats of last year’s antics.

An excellent source for college news is Campus Reform, a conservative website operated by the Leadership Institute (https://www.campusreform.org). Its reporters are college students. Here is a tiny sample of last year’s bizarre stories.

Donna Riley, a professor at Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education, published an article in the most recent issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Engineering Education, positing that academic rigor is a “dirty deed” that upholds “white male heterosexual privilege.” Riley added that “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing.” Would you hire an engineering education graduate who has little mastery of the rigor of engineering? What does Riley’s vision, if actually practiced by her colleagues, do to the worth of degrees in engineering education from Purdue held by female and black students?

Sympathizing with Riley’s vision is Rochelle Gutierrez, a math education professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In her recent book, she says the ability to solve algebra and geometry problems perpetuates “unearned privilege” among whites. Educators must be aware of the “politics that mathematics brings” in society. She thinks that “on many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness.” After all, she adds, “who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White.” What’s worse is that the university’s interim provost, John Wilkin, sanctioned her vision, telling Fox News that Gutierrez is an established and admired scholar who has been published in many peer-reviewed publications. I hope that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s black students don’t have the same admiration and stay away from her classes.

Last February, a California State University, Fullerton professor assaulted a CSUF Republicans member during a demonstration against President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration. The students identified the assailant as Eric Canin, an anthropology professor. Fortunately, the school had the good sense to later suspend Canin after confirming the allegations through an internal investigation.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

EPA Staff to Get Cut in Half Daniel Greenfield

By on January 10th, 2018

The EPA has probably cost as many American jobs as China. Not to mention driving up the prices of everything. Now it’s the EPA that’s shedding jobs for a change.

The EPA Tuesday provided to Secrets its first year staff results which show that the agency is below levels not seen since former President Reagan’s administration.

And if just those slated to retire by early 2021 leave, Administrator Scott Pruitt and his team will have reduced a staff of nearly 15,000, to below 8,000, or a reduction of 47 percent.

This doesn’t include the fake CIA Global Warming expert whose retirement is taxpayer funded, but is being routed through the penal system.

The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change was sentenced to 32 months in federal prison Wednesday for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job.

He also said he used the time “trying to find ways to fine tune the capitalist system” to discourage companies from damaging the environment. “I spent a lot of time reading on that,” said Beale.

Of course the mass retirements aren’t a done deal yet, but it does look like one of the destroyers of American prosperity will have plenty of time to read about the evils of capitalism. And while it will be at taxpayer expense, EPA operatives will at least be doing less damage when they’re not working for the government.

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The swamp’s secrets, lies and media leaks. Daniel Greenfield

By on January 10th, 2018

How Hillary’s FBI Allies Undermined Trump Before the Election

Peter Strzok wanted some insurance.

The senior FBI figure, who had participated in the Hillary email investigation, interviewed Flynn and had been part of Team Mueller, wasn’t looking to State Farm for his insurance needs.

Chatting with his mistress, an FBI lawyer who worked for Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok worried that Trump might win. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he wrote.

“It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

It was the summer of an election year. The official odds all favored Hillary. But a failed FISA request had already been made. And the real insurance was still coming. Its policies would include a second successful FISA request, the Steele dossier, the mass unmasking of Trump officials and the Mueller witch hunt. The insurance still hasn’t paid off, but the men and women behind the coup are betting that it will.

By the time October rolled around, the cost of the insurance was still rising. In late October, as Election Day was coming up, Strzok and Page were looking over their own leaks to the media. They discussed the stories in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post that they had allegedly helped shape.

Leaking, not football, is the supreme sport of our nation’s capital. Sabotage and self-promotion are the two reasons that government types leak. And this was clearly sabotage. Election Day was coming up and a top investigation figure was seeding damaging stories about President Trump through the media.

“Article is out, but hidden behind paywall so can’t read it,” Strzok’s mistress texted him.

“Wsj? Boy that was fast. Should I ‘find’ it and tell the team?” he asked.

The team wasn’t aware of what Strzok was up to. And he didn’t want them to find out. Like other anti-Trump operatives, Strzok was playing a complicated double game. He was pretending to conduct fair investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, even as he wanted her to win and him to lose.

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Donald Trump—the Grownup in the Room on Immigration By Roger L Simon

By on January 10th, 2018

Donald Trump gets called crazy a lot. Or infantile. Or senile. More than a bit of projection may be operative in these allegations, however. Watching Tuesday’s televised discussion of immigration (video here) with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders, which the president opened to the media, it was hard not to come to an opposite conclusion.

Donald Trump was the real grownup in the room.

Yes, he made occasional jokes, but that’s what grownups do to relax tense situations. To get politicians from both sides of the aisle talking to each other cordially in the current hyper-partisan atmosphere is no easy feat. But Trump did that. He showed himself to be what many of us have thought him to be from the outset, whatever the attendant melodrama — a pragmatic businessman with moderately conservative views, even, dare I say it, sometimes weirdly wise. Above all, he is a man who likes to make progress, who wants to move things forward to a better day while recognizing that there is no perfect. How adult is that.

And, yes, it’s possible this event was arranged to counteract the bad publicity from Michael Wolff’s bilious, factually challenged book, but so what? Basically, Trump (with the help of the cameras) shamed his fellow and gal politicians into civility and evidently cajoled them into at least a partial solution, later, in closed session, to that most intractable of problems – immigration. If Trump were anything like his detractors say he is, he couldn’t have done either. He even urged them on to a more global solution on immigration, reminding the politicians at the table they were closer to that goal than they realized. If that’s crazy, maybe we need more of it.

But what of this partial solution? By its very nature, ideologues of the left and right will not be satisfied. (Are they ever?) Lefties want to solve DACA first and then, once the “Dreamers” have their “pathway to citizenship,” the left promises to deal with border security and such things as chain migration and the trendily named Diversity Visa Lottery later. Of course, that’s nonsense. They have no intention of doing anything to mitigate the latter two and to the former they will only pay lip service.

Every politician in the room knew that and so, of course, did Trump. He made sure it didn’t happen.

On the right, Anne Coulter and others of her ilk will doubtless be disappointed, to put it mildly, that an impregnable border wall will not immediately be erected across the entire Southern border and all eleven million illegal aliens summarily ejected from our country. They will claim Trump promised this during the campaign, and he did at moments, but if you were listening carefully, you knew where he was ultimately going — he hinted at it and more many times — compromise.

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Hungary’s PM: Migrants Aren’t Refugees, but Muslim Invaders By Michael van der Galien

By on January 10th, 2018

In an interview with German newspaper Bild, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said that the “the migrant crisis” is, in effect, “an invasion.”

When asked by Bild why Hungary hasn’t deemed itself able to welcome two thousand refugees while Germany has let in two million of them, Orban answered: “[T]he difference is: you want those migrants. We do not. We do our job by closing the Schengen-border with Serbia. Doing so has cost us one billion euros since 2015 and Brussels pays us nothing for it.”

“The solution to this problem isn’t to divide people who are illegally in the EU among EU member states. We believe that we have to solve the root of the problem instead of bringing these immigrants here [Europe],” the prime minister continued.

“We do not consider these people as Muslim refugees. We consider them as Muslim invaders. To travel to Hungary from Syria they have to cross through four other countries that are, although not as rich as Germany, certainly stable. They don’t flee for their lives. This proves that they are economic migrants seeking a better life,” Orban concluded.

Bild then asked Orban whether this makes those migrants inferior in some way. “If someone wants to come to your home,” the PM answered, “then he knocks on the door and asks: ‘Can we come in, can we stay?’ They did not do that. Instead, they broke through the border illegally. That was not a wave of refugees, that was an invasion.”

He then lashed out at Germany for welcoming these illegals. “I have never understood how in a country like Germany — which we see as the best example of discipline and the rule of law — chaos, anarchy and the illegal crossing of borders can be celebrated,” Orban declared.

Orban then continued to blame Germany’s political leaders (rightfully) for the refugee crisis. “Although the refugee crisis is a European problem,” he explained, “sociologically it is a German problem. When your government addressed the EU refugee quota [the EU wants every country to welcome a specific amount of refugees], why did the Portuguese prime minister cry out: ‘Welcome!’? Because not one single refugee actually wants to go to Portugal. They all want to go to Germany. The reason why these people are in your country isn’t that they’re refugees, but that they want to experience the German way of life.”

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Iran and Daesh Lite in North America By Rachel Ehrenfeld

By on January 10th, 2018

Recent mass demonstrations in Iran, and the government’s violent crackdown has been met with a deafening silence by Muslim “civil rights” organizations in the U.S. and Canada. Why have they refrained from supporting the Iranian people’s uprising to overthrow the oppressive mullahs? After all, the same organizations have vocally and financially supported the mass demonstrations in the Middle East and North Africa that erupted in December 2010 and led to the rise of Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government and caused turmoil and destabilized these regions.

American and Canadian Muslim organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in the U.S. and Canada, the Muslim Student Association (MSA) in the U.S. and Canada, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) (including its Canadian branch), share the similar agenda and boards and serve as umbrellas to many smaller associations and community-based groups. Their charities aim to expand the implementation of their agenda, and a few of them have been identified as unindicted co-conspirator in Islamist terrorist financing trials in the U.S. Their common mission: dedication to “da’wah” (proselytization), building “an Islamic way of life in North America[, and] commitment to Islam as a total way of life” by practicing sharia (Islamic law). This desire to impose any version of Islam on society to establish global Islamic theocracy via political activism, has been accurately described by Prof. Clive Kessler as “political Islam” or “ISIS/Daesh lite.”

Political Islam has been successfully enforced by the mullahs in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Over the years, they have increased their efforts to enforce and spread political Islam everywhere. Their efforts did not stop with Shite groups; rather, they extended especially to Sunni Muslim Brotherhood offshoots such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, the first foreign trip of Egypt’s now deposed Muslim Brother president, Mohammed Morsi, was to visit Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s short-lived government (June 2012-July 2013) has failed because the Egyptian people rejected its oppression early on.

The ousting of the M.B. government was followed with banning its activities in Egypt and later in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria. But by then, the global Brotherhood’s movement has been well entrenched in the West, where their activities are not limited and often encouraged. The leaders of the Islamist movement have doubled their efforts to spread and whenever possible, to enforce political Islam on Muslims and infidels alike.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Winter Weather Climate Spin Contradicts Science By Julie Kelly

By on January 10th, 2018

Climate-change spinmeisters have been in overdrive since late December, hustling to explain how this spate of treacherous, winter weather is all due to global warming…just like they told us. (No doubt, the next thaw or blizzard will be mankind’s fault, too.) But their avowals mostly contradict scientific fact—including facts they have affirmed in reports they helped write themselves—not to mention current weather trends.

On January 4, as a “bomb cyclone” savaged the eastern seaboard, Al Gore tweeted this:

Al Gore
✔ @algore It’s bitter cold in parts of the US, but climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann explains that’s exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis. http://ow.ly/Gdm230hAFv4

Gore, who oddly didn’t include clips of massive snowstorms and record-breaking cold temperatures in his films or paid lectures about global warming, linked to an article written by Michael Mann, a Penn State University scientist, author of the infamous “hockey stick” graph, and the media’s favorite climate mouthpiece.

In his customary, humble fashion, Mann appropriates the two-week stretch of brutal weather as evidence of exactly what he’s been saying all along: “Listening to climate contrarians like President Donald Trump, you might think this constitutes the death knell for concern over human-caused climate change. Yet, what we were witnessing play out is in fact very much consistent with our expectations of the response of weather dynamics to human-caused climate change.” The professor then throws in some maps and graphs to purportedly boost his claim, and concludes with, “so, to the climate change doubters and deniers out there, the unusual weather we’re seeing this winter is in no way evidence against climate change. It is an example of precisely the sort of extreme winter weather we expect because of climate change.”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Sex vs. Political Correctness? By Angelo Codevilla

By on January 10th, 2018

The Left has some reason to worry that the newfound solicitude for sexual propriety spread by #MeToo might overflow the traditional bounds of political-correctness-as-weapon.

No different from demands regarding race and identity politics generally, the strictures of political correctness concerning sex do not define rights and wrongs. Rather, they claim authority to suppress such evils as the powerful may impute to their enemies. They also serve the ruling class’s war against Western Civilization. But current demands for “sensitivity” for women’s sense of sexual self-worth, rather than merely enhancing the power of better-connected people over less-connected ones, might actually lead America to consider what proper or improper sexual behavior is.

Neither P.C.’s partisan nature nor its corrosion of our civilization are in doubt. Elsewhere, I showed that Communists originated the term to distinguish between the “correctness” of what serves the Party’s interest from that which is factually correct—and that the Party’s paramount long-term interest lies in overcoming the reality that human beings perceive through the senses and reason with the Party’s “correct” version thereof.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), the most durably influential of Communist theoreticians, had argued that re-orienting the popular mind away from the cultural icons of Western Civilization would anchor the Party’s power to a cultural hegemony impossible to break. Gramsci’s argument is all too well rooted in modern thought since Machiavelli, and cultural destruction has been part of every revolutionary movement at least since the French Revolution.

The fundamental problem with cultural revolution is that it is easier to destroy cultures than to replace them. The end-states sought are inherently undefinable. Each and every revolutionary will have his own ideas of what is proper and improper. Since those ideas must be bound up with the struggles of each for his own power. As the revolutionaries clash, incoherence is guaranteed. Beyond that, No matter what the revolutionaries do to disorient people, human nature’s magnetic needles always end up pointing people away from that which is merely politically correct.

Of all human nature’s aspects, sex is among the most intractable to political power. Soviet teaching (see Marx and Engels’ “The Origins of the Family”) and policy reflected the Marxist notion that humans are animals, and the sexes are equally self-interested. As Soviet family policy see-sawed, natural families were wrecked. Powerful males lorded over females, as it is in the animal world, and females then acted defensively or manipulatively toward men. Russia is not a happy place, and its population is declining.

Here and now, a New York Times op-ed by Daphne Merkin reflects the sense growing among erstwhile P.C. revolutionaries of the feminist kind that they have been on the wrong path. Their most immediate concern is ordinary partisanship. Merkin and her friends find it “troubling” that men such as “Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Schwartz, Ryan Lizza and Al Franken” have been hurt by accusations they regard as unspecific and unproven. OK. But logic then leads to asking what behavior it should take to disqualify even such worthy people. Political correctness has no answers. “Scattershot, life-destroying denunciations” are not enough. “Due process is nowhere to be found.”

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North Korea’s Peace Games Kim Jong Un tries to drive a wedge between the South and the U.S.

By on January 10th, 2018

Talks between North and South Korea Tuesday at the Demilitarized Zone have handed Kim Jong Un a propaganda victory. The two sides agreed that athletes from the North will compete in next month’s Winter Olympics in the South. The talks and the “Olympic truce” allow the young dictator to pose as a man of peace, even as he threatens to annihilate his enemies with nuclear weapons.

This is galling enough, but Kim has his eye on the bigger prize of driving a wedge between Seoul and Washington. In recent days U.S. officials have expressed confidence that this won’t happen because the talks would be limited to the Olympics. But the onus is now on South Korean President Moon Jae-in to make clear that the North can’t divide and conquer.

Kim’s New Year’s Day speech with its proposal of talks with the South was surprising given Pyongyang’s longstanding policy of dealing only with the U.S. on strategic matters. According to the North’s propaganda, Seoul has always been a puppet of the American imperialists. The biggest exception came in 2000, when South Korean President Kim Dae-jung secretly paid the North hundreds of millions of dollars to participate in a summit. That led to a brief period of entente known as the Sunshine Policy, lubricated with copious amounts of aid.

President Moon wants to revive some of the Sunshine Policy, including an industrial park that let the North earn about $100 million a year from South Korean companies. Contradicting U.S. policy that the North should first curtail its nuclear and missile programs, Mr. Moon has called for direct talks since taking office in May. The North snubbed those overtures as it sprinted to perfect its missiles, but now it thinks it can gain a political advantage by luring the South back into talks.

Mr. Moon now has his wish of talks, and the Trump Administration probably felt it had to oblige because of the Olympics. Seoul asked to postpone routine military exercises for fear the North might use them as an excuse to launch a conventional military strike during the games, and the U.S. acquiesced. In March 2010 the North sank a South Korean ship, killing 46 sailors, and in November of that year it shelled the island of Yeonpyeong in the South, killing two soldiers and two civilians.

North Korea may hope the South will continue talks after the Olympics and break ranks with the U.S. Stricter United Nations sanctions are now coming into force, cutting the flow of fuel imports and preventing North Korea from earning hard currency with exports. That makes the prospect of a reconciliation with South Korea especially appealing.

But even if Mr. Moon wants to help the North, he faces greater constraints than his predecessors. The sanctions restrict his ability to offer monetary aid, and the heightened tension on the Korean Peninsula as a result of the North’s dash to become a nuclear-weapons state has increased the South’s dependence on the U.S. security umbrella.

The U.S. military has announced that the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and its battle group will deploy off the coast of Korea during the Olympics. Such deployments are a more reliable guarantor of peace than the gestures of a young dictator who pretends to want peace even as he threatens war.

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