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Ruth King

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The Next Big Middle Eastern War Saudi Arabia vs. Iran. Daniel Greenfield

By on November 17th, 2017

The Syrian Civil War killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. Its ripple effects brought terror to Europe and dragged the United States into the fighting. And it’s just the appetizer for the coming war.

The real war is the one that the Saudis and the Iranians have been maneuvering toward for years. Those maneuvers included everything from Iran’s nuke deal, the fighting in Yemen, the Syrian Civil War, the Iraqi suppression of Kurdish independence, the rise of ISIS, and the Qatari embargo.

The death toll from the buildup to the Sunni-Shiite regional war is approaching a million. And the war hasn’t even begun yet. It may never become an actual war as we understand it. It’s possible that there will be a hundred little wars exploding across the region. These wars will tear apart more of the region and the talking heads on television will blame global warming or Israeli settlements.

Those progressive excuses make much more sense to the media than an Islamic religious war.

And it will almost certainly drag us in.

Obama’s policies lit the fuse. The withdrawal from Iraq, the Arab Spring, the Iranian Nuke deal and the alliance with the Shiite regime in Baghdad did a great deal to increase Iranian power. When the United States left Iraq, Iran took control. The Arab Spring tore apart the region. And Iran used the opportunity to expand its power over Yemen, Iraq and Syria. The nuke deal signaled that Obama wouldn’t do anything to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power or a regional power. And by outsourcing the fight against ISIS to Shiite terrorist militias, Obama allowed Iran to consolidate control over Iraq and Syria.

The Saudis and the Iranians are both assembling their coalitions. And they’re coloring outside the lines. Qatar’s billionaire Sunni Islamists are aligned with Iran. That’s why the Saudis slapped an embargo on the terror state. Meanwhile Israel is loosely aligned with the Saudis. That may sound strange, but Israel’s biggest threats, from Iran’s nukes to Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, can be traced back to Tehran.

The Saudis are no slouches when it comes to funding Islamic terrorists. But Qatar’s fellow Sunni oil tyrannies looked at the way that its allies, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda variants, were tearing apart entire countries, and decided that the little terror state had become too powerful and dangerous.

Iran and Qatar aggressively expanded their influence by using Islamist militias to tear down and take over countries. And between them, the two Islamic terror states were transforming the Middle East.

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Taking English Seriously Requiring new Americans to learn the language will encourage them to assimilate to their adopted home. Mark Krikorian Jason Richwine

By on November 17th, 2017

Jovita Mendez of Escondido, California became an American citizen in October. Ordinarily, this would be cause for celebration, as we welcome a new member of the American family. Mendez may struggle to fit in, though, because the native of Mexico still can’t speak English; in fact, she can’t read or write in any language.

Legislation passed by Congress in 1990 exempts certain individuals, based on age and length of residence in the United States, from the requirement that they speak, read, and write English before obtaining citizenship. Lawmakers put this exemption in place because so many immigrants were not acquiring even a rudimentary grasp of English (which is all that the citizenship test requires), even after decades of living in the U.S. The latest Census Bureau data show that the number of people speaking a foreign language at home reached 65.5 million last year—double the number in 1990 and triple that of 1980.

Between 2012 and 2014, the U.S. participated in the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), which assesses literacy skills across the industrialized world. The PIAAC’s definition of literacy stipulates “understanding, evaluating, using, and engaging with written text to participate in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.” In the U.S., the tests were administered in English, and the sample (over 8,000 American adults) was large enough to analyze immigrant scores separately from those of native-born Americans. The results show a large and persistent English-literacy deficit among immigrants. Overall, immigrants score at just the 21st percentile of the distribution, and 41 percent of immigrants are “below basic”—a level sometimes described as functional illiteracy. Problems with English-language acquisition in the U.S. most often involve Hispanic immigrants, many of whom live in Spanish-speaking enclaves that slow assimilation. The average Hispanic immigrant scores at just the 8th percentile on the English literacy test, and 63 percent score below basic.

More troubling than the deficit itself is its persistence. Among immigrants who arrived more than 15 years prior to the test, the results were largely the same—43 percent scored below basic, including 67 percent of Hispanics. As for the children of immigrants, the good news is that their average score is close to the average of the general population. The bad news is that the average disguises a persistent inequality. While the children of non-Hispanic immigrants score at the 60th percentile, the children of Hispanic immigrants score at just the 34th. In other words, low English literacy is a multigenerational problem.

These results may be surprising in light of the positive news that we often hear about English acquisition. “Latino immigrants acquire English as quickly as, or more quickly than, Asian and European immigrants,” wrote Dylan Matthews in the Washington Post. “Fully 89 percent of U.S.-born Latinos spoke English proficiently in 2013,” according to a Pew Hispanic Center report. These numbers are based not on an objective test of literacy, but rather on a Census question that asks, simply, “How well do [you] speak English?” Researchers then assume that anyone who answers “very well” (or speaks only English at home) is proficient. Unfortunately, the PIAAC data show that Hispanic immigrants who say that they speak English “very well” score at just the 33rd percentile on the literacy test—about the same as U.S.-born Hispanics score, despite their “proficiency,” as defined by Pew.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Princeton and Slavery Leave it to a university not to know its history. Myron Magnet

By on November 17th, 2017

Since our universities have become intellectual black holes—dead stars which no longer radiate light but instead suck enlightenment into darkness by the irresistible gravitational pull of their collapse—little wonder that whatever they have to say about their own history and slavery is mere obscurantism. But Princeton, for the moment, wins the palm and the laurel for militant ignorance. Here’s an educational institution that, more than any other, could boast of giving us our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Instead, it is engaged in today’s apparently gratifying (if perverse) self-flagellation of counting the ways in which it was complicit with slavery—minor, compared with the ways in which it gave us our liberty.

Yes, lots of slave-owning Southerners attended the College of New Jersey in its early days. And yes, the university’s first six presidents, from the time of its foundation in 1746, owned slaves—not astonishing when you consider that New Jersey did not abolish slavery until 1804, and that even such a vehement abolitionist as John Jay, a founder of the New York Manumission (anti-slavery) Society, also owned a slave or two at one point in his life. America was—to its everlasting shame—a slave-owning republic, until the northern states outlawed it out of a sense of justice and then fought a Civil War to extirpate it from the rest of the nation—not, as W.E. B. Du Bois rightly says, to assert states’ rights, or to adjust borders, but simply out of the moral recognition that slavery was wrong.

Every slave-owning Founding Father knew that it was wrong, including Thomas Jefferson, who wrote into the Declaration of Independence the immortal words that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right to liberty, and who wrote later in his life that “When the measure of [the slaves’] tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a god of justice will awaken to their distress, and . . . by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not to be left to the guidance of a blind fatality.” And so He did, with His terrible swift sword.

One of those early Princeton presidents—the sixth, John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence—was a Scotch Presbyterian minister who brought to these shores the Scottish Enlightenment that also produced Adam Smith and David Hume, and that bristled with a belief in independence of thought and conscience and radical republicanism. And to whom did this great man impart these beliefs? None other than his favorite pupil, Virginia slave-owner James Madison, who went back home to the Piedmont on fire with the idea of liberty of conscience, an idea that, it so happened, ends only in political liberty for the intellectually consistent, as Madison emphatically was. And so Madison sat in his library overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains, reading history and political philosophy, until he arrived at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 with a fully formed plan for the Constitution—which, with remarkable political flexibility, he was able to compromise into something that all the representatives could sign and all the states ratify. And when he understood, as leader of the first Congress under the new Constitution, how avid was the nation’s thirst for a Bill of Rights, he wrote one, and passed it through the legislature, sorry that he hadn’t made it his first piece of business.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Anti-Trump Chihuahuas Overlook the President’s Many Achievements By Roger Kimball

By on November 17th, 2017

I am told that on that this day in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Despite Walter Duranty’s protestations to the contrary in The New York Times, that was while Stalin was systematically starving millions—yes, millions—of his own people. He went so far as to seal the windows of trains running through the areas he wished to devastate so that passengers could not throw out food to the starving multitudes. FDR knew this. So: was his diplomatic action a good thing or a bad thing?

On this day in 1985, Ronald Reagan travelled to Geneva to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev. The Cold War was still raging. So: was Reagan’s action a good thing or a bad thing?

Fun archival project: go back to the 1980s and read what The New York Times (and kindred outlets) had to say about Ronald Reagan. He was a moron. He was a war monger. He was being played by Gorbachev.

Fast forward to today. Andrew Rosenthal, writing in The New York Times, wants us to know how “grown-ups” deal with Vladimir Putin. His proffered adult is Prime Minister Theresa May, who, in her address at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, gave a tart (and accurate) assessment of Putin’s hostile actions, from his annexation of Crimea to his propaganda war and “weaponization” of information technology. Spot on, Mrs. May!

Andrew Rosenthal contrasts May’s blast against Putin with Donald Trump’s diplomatic efforts.

Let’s leave aside the hypocrisy of a reporter for The New York Times stepping onto his high horse to deliver anti-Russian salvos. Shameless: he even invokes Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech in Berlin. Go back and read what the Times had to say about that phrase at the time.

You do not have to convince me that Vladimir Putin is a nasty piece of work. Indeed (commercial break), I am just about to publish Putin on the March, Douglas Schoen’s brilliant book on that subject.

The world is full of bad guys. But if you are president of the United States, you should understand that the interests of peace and the interests of prosperity demand that you get along with other nations, if at all possible, especially powerful nations. Donald Trump was quite right when he tweeted a few days ago that “having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. . . . I want to solve North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, terrorism, and Russia can greatly help!”

It is “a good thing, not a bad thing” to have a good relationship with Russia. Ditto on China, Vietnam, South Korea, and the Philippines.

Yesterday, just back from his 12-day, 20,000-mile whirlwind trip through Asia, the president gave what posterity will regard as a turning-point speech. The master word of this speech was “confidence.” “When we are confident in ourselves,” the president said, confident in

our strength, our flag, our history, our values—other nations are confident in us. And when we treat our citizens with the respect they deserve, other countries treat America with the respect that our country so richly deserves.
During our travels, this is exactly what the world saw: a strong, proud, and confident America.

Donald Trump displayed, in a way we have not seen since the heyday of Ronald Reagan, what foreign-policy leadership looks like. We have serious differences with Russia and China. We also have areas of agreement and potential agreement. To address the former a canny leader endeavors to exploit the latter. This Donald Trump is doing.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Back to bolted down industries By Viv Forbes

By on November 17th, 2017

Enviromentalists are pushing Australian industry back into the 19th century.

Once upon a time Australia was attractive to processing, refining, and manufacturing industries using our abundant mineral and food resources, our reliable low-cost coal-fired electricity and a workforce trained in technical skills.

No longer.

Australia used to have 11 oil refineries, spread around the country. There are just four left, all over fifty years old, and all in danger of closing down. Green barriers to oil exploration have forced most of them to rely on costly imported crude oil.

Now, for the first time in at least 60 years, Australia no longer produces motor vehicles.

China and India have about 430 coal power plants under construction, but Australia has not built a single coal-fired power station for seven years — some politicians even rejoice when they manage to close and demolish one.

Brisbane’s new trains are being made in India, Victa mowers are made in China and most coastal shipping died decades ago. Steel works and refineries producing aluminium, copper and zinc are under stress. All these industries are being pushed overseas by costly unreliable electricity and other government barriers and burdens.

Red-green policies being pushed by all major parties are making Australia more dependent on bolted-down industries such as mining and farming that can’t be sent overseas because their basic resources are here. And green opposition to nuclear power increases Aussie reliance on coal.

A century ago Australians relied on wool, wheat, gold, silver, copper, lead-zinc, butter, beef and timber — all products of bolted-down industries.

Red-green policies are pushing us back to those days. Politicians need to remember Newton’s Law of Bureaucracy — whenever the government tries to use the force of law to achieve economic goals the long-term results will be equal and opposite to those intended.

So in the long run, red-green energy and environmental policies will make us more dependent on the industries they now attack — mining, farming, forestry, and fishing.

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A Game-Changer in the House of Saud? By Alex Alexiev

By on November 17th, 2017

The dramatic events in Saudi Arabia of the past few days portend a game change in the Middle East not seen in decades. Predictably, the mainstream media, desperate as they are to find something, anything to blame on President Trump, have completely missed it. Instead, they have babbled about the market implications of the arrests of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Co., Saudi Arabia ‘emerging’ as an arms manufacturer, conflict with Hezbollah, palace intrigue, etc. etc. Few have put their finger on the actual events – a palace revolution in Riyadh that could change the Middle East in profound and possibly positive ways. For the logic of what’s taking place in the House of Saud is a revolt against the medieval obscurantism that has been the lifeblood of radical Islam and indeed terrorism since the middle of the 20th century. There is no guarantee that it will succeed, for the forces arrayed against it are formidable, but fundamentally, as with the demise of any long-lasting obscurantism, the more appropriate question to ask is: ‘What took so long?’

To seasoned observers, what is taking place in Riyadh is not a complete surprise and some inkling of changing attitudes was on hand as far back as the Arab Spring in 2011, when the Saudis appeared to end their longtime support of the Muslim Brotherhood, and take the side of the military in Egypt, quite unlike the Obama administration which remained wedded to the myth that the MB was a ‘moderate’ organization. Three years later, the UAE declared 82 Islamic organizations, including two prominent American ones (CAIR and MAS) long supported by the Saudis, to be terrorist and this past summer came the break with Qatar for its support of radical jihadists in Syria and elsewhere.

Much more important are the unmistakable signs that the new Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MbS, is turning on the reactionary Wahhabi establishment that has long supported radical Islam and terrorism. While his ostensible drive against corruption has received much ink, it has largely escaped notice that caught in the ‘corruption’ purge were senior Wahhabi clerics like Salman al-Awdah, Awad al-Qarni and others. And there is a good reason for their detention, if MbS is serious about “preventing extremism” and “crimes under the name of Islam,” as he has said time and again. It is a fact that the belief system of the dominant Wahhabi ulema is ideologically indistinguishable from that of the ISIS zealots. As an example of the kind of pushback he can expect, no less a figure that the former imam of the key Mecca mosque, Adel al-Kibani, continues to argue publicly that ISIS draws it inspiration from Saudi salafism.

Nonetheless, MbS has continued and accelerated his assault on Wahhabism. Not only has he promised to do away with the Wahhabi ban on women driving and reined in the religious police, but he has now forced the ‘Shura Council’ a hardline Wahhabi ulema outfit, heretofore, to approve an anti-hate law, apart from setting up a “Hadith Complex” in Medina, tasked with “monitoring interpretations of Islamic teachings used to justify violence or terrorism.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

“Moore” is Yet to Come in 2018 By Julie Kelly

By on November 17th, 2017

The last thing the world needs is another opinion on the Roy Moore scandal, so I will spare you my revelatory and game-changing lowdown on the whole thing.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/16/moore-is-yet-to-come-in-2018/

I will, however, say this: If you think this is bad, just wait until 2018.

By this time next year, the Moore story will seem like one of those weightless, superfluous amuse-bouche concoctions the server gives you courtesy of the kitchen, which always turns out to be more of a vanity project of the chef than anything intended to satiate you. Yet it arouses your appetite, and after you’ve gorged yourself on multiple courses, shifting uncomfortably in your chair from overindulgence, cursing your excess yet gratified by the experience, the amuse bouche is long forgotten. But it was the first bite of the feast.

If Doug Jones wins the Alabama senate seat next month, Democrats will need two more pick-ups next year to take control of the U.S. Senate. (According to the recent Cook Political Report, just two Republican seats are now listed as toss-ups: Arizona, a state Trump won, and Nevada, a state Trump narrowly lost. The rest are in safe R states.) Although the outlook for Democrats to regain control of the House of Representatives is bleaker—“if Democrats were to hold all of the seats we rate as leaning towards them, all 12 of the Toss Ups, and half of the seats in Lean Republican, they would still fall two seats shy of a majority,” according to an October 6 analysis in Cook—Dems are now emboldened by big wins in Virginia earlier this month and the dumpster fire that is now the GOP panicking over Roy Moore’s stubborn candidacy.

While most normal people view the Roy Moore scandal as another example of America’s rotting political sewer, Democrats are downright giddy about what they think is an early Christmas present. Party operatives—and their minions who work in the media—are undoubtedly plotting how to replicate this debacle, resuscitate long-dormant rumors about sexual misconduct, lure victims out of the shadows and into Gloria Allred’s loving talons, er, arms. No yearbook or shopping mall will be spared. It is but a small, if tawdry, taste of what’s to come.

There are already ominous clues about what 2018 will offer our hide-the-children electorate. Liberals are now in self-flagellation mode over how they handled serial-abuser Bill Clinton for the past 25 years. A generation raised on Clinton-worship is learning a history they probably never knew, and victims who have been vilified and ignored are finally getting some measure of justice in the court of public opinion. But don’t kid yourself; this collective mea culpa is nothing more than a way for Democrats and the media to erase their past culpability to regain future credibility. How can they attack Republican offenders next year if they defended Clinton for so long? They learned a lesson when voters seemed largely anesthetized to allegations against Donald Trump, and the media will not let that happen again. So, now that they have offered up their phony apologies—and have an arsenal of tweets and articles to prove their repentance—the left has immunized itself against criticism. It’s about as cynical a move as you can get.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany: Spike in Stabbings by Soeren Kern

By on November 17th, 2017

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policies have set in motion a self-reinforcing cycle of violence in which more and more people are carrying knives in public — including for self-defense.

A 40-year-old man stabbed to death his 31-year-old wife and mother of their three children. Police said the man was angry that his wife was using social media.

A “dark-skinned” man (dunklem Teint) drew a knife on a 54-year-old female train conductor when she asked him for his ticket.

A recent surge in stabbings and knife-related violence across Germany is drawing renewed attention to the deteriorating security situation there since Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to allow in more than a million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

In recent months, people armed with knives, axes and machetes have brought devastation to all of Germany’s 16 federal states. Knives have been used not only not only to carry out jihadist attacks, but also to commit homicides, robberies, home invasions, sexual assaults, honor killings and many other types of violent crime.

Knife-related crimes have occurred in amusement parks, bicycle trails, hotels, parks, public squares, public transportation, restaurants, schools, supermarkets and train stations. Many Germans have the sense that danger lurks everywhere; public safety, nowhere.

Police admit they are outnumbered and overwhelmed and increasingly unable to maintain public order — both day and night.

Statistics that are reliable on knife violence in Germany — where police been accused of failing to report many crimes, apparently in an effort “not to unsettle” the public — do not exist.

A search of German police blotters, however, indicates that 2017 is on track to become a record year for stabbings and knife crimes: Police reported more than 3,500 knife-related crimes between January and October 2017, compared to around 4,000 reported crimes during all of 2016 — and only 300 in 2007. Overall, during the past ten years, knife-related crimes in Germany have increased by more than 1,200%.

The media in Germany do not report most knife-related violence. Crimes that are reported are often dismissed as “isolated incidents,” unrelated to mass immigration. Moreover, many crime reports, including those in police blotters, omit any reference at all to the nationalities of the perpetrators and victims — ostensibly to avoid inflaming anti-immigration sentiments.

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Communism’s Long Shadow Over India The Bolshevik revolution helped disfigure the country’s economic imagination.By Sadanand Dhume

By on November 17th, 2017

As the world marks the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, our attention has naturally turned to how communism ravaged the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European vassals. But the ideology also cast a shadow outside the communist world. In terms of the sheer number of people affected, India suffered more than any noncommunist country. Overcoming this poisonous legacy remains a work in progress.

Of course, democratic India witnessed no Soviet-style show trials or gulags. There is no modern Indian equivalent of China’s brutal Cultural Revolution or Great Leap Forward. Nothing in independent India’s experience approaches the horrors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

But though India may have been spared the worst of communist excesses, it nonetheless paid a price for the ideology’s rise to global prominence. Simply put, communism helped disfigure India’s economic imagination. If India still houses 268 million people who earn less than $1.90 a day—the World Bank’s official estimate for poverty—at least part of the blame belongs to politicians besotted by the Soviet experiment before it finally collapsed.

Lenin’s revolution had an impact on India even before its independence from Britain in 1947. Twenty years earlier, Jawaharlal Nehru, at the time an up-and-coming leader in the Congress Party, visited Moscow for the 10th anniversary of the revolution. He later wrote: “I had no doubt that the Soviet Revolution had advanced human society by a great leap and had lit a bright flame that could not be smothered.”

Though himself a Fabian socialist, a worldview he picked up as a student in Britain, Nehru freely acknowledged the impact of communism on his economic thinking. After independence, with Nehru at the helm, India enthusiastically embraced state planning. As the theory went, high-minded bureaucrats would make better economic decisions than grubby entrepreneurs.

Nehru decreed that lavishly funded state-owned companies would control “the commanding heights” of India’s economy. The phrase itself was borrowed from Lenin. In 1955 the ruling Congress Party declared its intent to establish “a socialistic pattern of society” in India.

Nehru’s fans point out that planning was all the rage in the 1950s. Communists were hardly the only ones enamored by it. This is true, but it glosses over prescient early critiques of India’s statist path by the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman and the Indian free market economist B.R. Shenoy.

Over the first three decades of independence, Nehru, followed by his daughter Indira Gandhi, built one of the most dirigiste economies outside the communist world. Between them they nationalized aviation (1953), life insurance (1956), banks (1969) and coal mines (1973). CONTINUE AT SITE

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump’s South China Sea Message He laid down some important markers on his Asia tour.

By on November 17th, 2017

An underreported theme of President Trump’s Asia tour was his attention to a regional flashpoint overshadowed by North Korea: the South China Sea. While Mr. Trump avoided public statements on the issue in China, he laid down important markers in Vietnam and the Philippines.

For five years China has escalated tensions by building military bases on artificial islands. Last year a United Nations tribunal found that China’s claim to territorial waters violated international law, but Beijing dismissed the judgment. Chinese vessels continue to harass the ships of the other six nations that claim territory and economic rights in the area.

In his Nov. 10 speech to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Danang, Mr. Trump cited territorial expansion as a threat to regional stability. “We must uphold principles that have benefitted all of us, like respect for the rule of law, individual rights, and freedom of navigation and overflight, including open shipping lanes. These principles create stability and build trust, security, and prosperity among like-minded nations,” he said.

The remarks are a direct challenge to China, which warns away ships and planes that pass near the land features it controls. Beijing reacted with outrage after the U.S. Navy conducted four “freedom of navigation operations” this year to assert the right to use waters claimed by China. An estimated $4.5 trillion in trade transits the South China Sea annually.

U.S.-Vietnam relations continue to warm as a result of China’s pressure. In July Vietnam abandoned oil exploration in its exclusive economic zone after threats from Beijing. Mr. Trump urged the Vietnamese to buy Patriot missiles, and the relationship could deepen into a strategic partnership.

In Manila, Mr. Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte issued a joint statement that stressed “the importance of peacefully resolving disputes in the South China Sea, in accordance with international law, as reflected in the Law of the Sea Convention.” Last year’s tribunal decision was based on the convention.

This is significant because Mr. Duterte previously offered to put the verdict aside and sought to cooperate with Beijing on oil-and-gas exploration. But China’s aggressive behavior is creating political pressure on Mr. Duterte to defend Philippine claims.

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