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Ruth King

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The Man from Alabama, Pa. Senate candidate Lou Barletta understands the fears of small-town Pennsylvanians. By Theodore Kupfer see note please

By on September 18th, 2017

Barletta is very pro-Israel for which he gets a -3 from the Arab American Institute…..rsk

It’s not an invasion, but for some in Hazleton, Pa., it feels like one. The northern Pennsylvania town is the home of Republican congressman Lou Barletta, whose 2018 campaign for Senate against incumbent Bob Casey has just begun. Barletta, the polished Italian American, looks the ambitious type in both style and CV: He served as mayor of Hazleton from 1998 to 2010 and ran for Congress thrice over that span. He finally won in 2010 and has been the representative for Pennsylvania’s eleventh district — which stretches from Luzerne County all the way down to Carlisle — ever since. But while some ambitious politicians are determined to leave their towns behind and enter the world of Washington, what animates Barletta is something quite different. Barletta is concerned about what, apparently, plagues his hometown and the rest of his beloved state: illegal immigration.

“They get it,” Barletta tells National Review. “Pennsylvanians understand that illegal immigration depresses wages, puts their jobs at risk, makes it harder at schools or to receive care from hospitals. They understand what it means.” In Barletta’s telling, it carries a mortal risk, too. In 2015, at a panel discussion hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies, he asked: “How many innocent people need to be murdered before we stop the [soft] policies dealing with illegal immigration?” Politically speaking, whether illegal immigration is the chief problem facing Pennsylvanians is less important than whether Pennsylvanians think it is. The question, in other words, is whether Barletta understands the Pennsylvanian mind. That, he certainly does.

Pennsylvania is a big state. The Commonwealth, as inhabitants call it with faint pride, is large enough to have a hinterland. Agriculture is a key business.

It’s also an old one. Entire industries have been born, grown, shrunk, died, and been reclaimed by the forest. One of them is coal, and Hazleton, an old coal town, has gone the way coal towns do. The veins of anthracite running through central and eastern Pennsylvania, and their proximity to ports across the eastern seaboard, caused European immigrants to migrate there during the 19th century. But as Simon Bronner, a professor at Penn State Harrisburg and the founding director of the Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies, tells National Review, economic progress in the early 20th century “displaced the coal towns and deindustrialized much of the state.” And while western Pennsylvania replaced anthracite with bituminous, and then replaced coal with steel, the central and eastern parts of the state struggled to find a new mainstay industry once their mining days were done.

In their heyday, these coal towns were diverse in the 19th-century fashion, full of Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Dutch, and Irish immigrants. Their churches — Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox — still dominate local architecture. Standing on the main drag in Ashland, which curves elegantly down a mountainside with houses lining the edge, one gets a sense of the past. Traditions die hard here: In the winter holidays, families still make “boilo,” a concoction of steeped fruit and Lithuanian spirits. Outsiders gawk at the bags of coal that remain for sale outside convenience stores.

But mining is now strictly a niche business in what some have christened “Coal Cracker” country, and with economic dislocation come social consequences. There are tourist attractions focusing on the old days, but things are changing. With the end of mining, “Mexican and Puerto Rican immigrants,” Bronner says, entered the state “for work in agriculture, construction, or services. At the same time, young descendants of the European immigrants left for faraway colleges. This migration helped these towns,” Bronner insists. “But there’s definitely a view that things are not what they were. There’s a reaction that these people are taking away jobs that were there previously. Families that had immigrated in the late 19th century don’t want to relocate, but they suddenly faced social change.”

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The Real Title of Hillary’s Book: Why I Should’ve Won Amid all the boilerplate, one insight sneaks through: She really does think lots of voters are horrible. By Kyle Smith

By on September 18th, 2017

The news that Hillary Clinton was writing a 2016 memoir called “What Happened” caused rare bipartisan joy: Everyone, left and right, was eager to hear what she had to say. What’s it like to think you’re about to poke through that glass ceiling and instead have it come crashing down on your head? What’s the deal with Trump? Would she throw shade at Bernie? What would she say about presiding over a campaign whose failure was catastrophic to her and, to liberals anyway, to the country? What was the inside dirt? A joke made the rounds that the book’s working title was What the F*** Happened?

But the book only makes sense when you realize that What Happened is a fake title, a P. T. Barnum–style ruse to draw in the suckers. The real subject of this 500-page chunk of self-congratulation and blame-shifting — its real title — is “Why I Should Have Won.” If Hollywood is a place where you peel off the fake tinsel only to find the real tinsel underneath, Hillary Clinton is homo politicus all the way through. It’s all she has. It’s all she is. She earned the Oval Office, dammit, and she wants you to know it. Peel off the phony, power-addled political hack, and all you’ll find is the real, power-addled political hack underneath.

Sure, Clinton does give us a few stray morsels of what we’re looking for, mostly at the very beginning, when she describes what must have been an agony for the ages in tightly controlled, supremely measured tones. She tells us about the pain and the Chardonnay and how surreal it felt to concede on Election Night, given that she had never imagined what she might say if she lost. “I just didn’t think about it,” she writes. Also, she took a nap that evening and was asleep when the news broke that she’d lost Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, and Ohio. But it’s all fairly bloodless — she give no explanation, for instance, of why she withheld her concession speech until the next day. No doubt she cherishes her privacy, but guardedness is not what one wants in a memoir.

The reserve is likely to disappoint both those who cried on Election Night and those who spent the wee hours of November 9 spraying their homes with the contents of a case of Veuve Clicquot. Yet there is poignancy here: She had every expectation of becoming the most powerful woman in the history of the world. Instead she’ll go down in the books defined by three gigantic public humiliations: the Lewinsky scandal and two losing presidential campaigns in which she was the heavy favorite. She wasn’t even the first woman to be secretary of state. She wasn’t even the second woman to be secretary of state. History is unkind to losers — quick, ask the nearest Millennial who Geraldine Ferraro was.

As the book proceeds, though, the reader’s heart sinks. Why all this stupefying name-checking of campaign aides who never get mentioned again? Why two pages about her hairdressers, but only two clipped paragraphs about that time she collapsed on 9/11? Why is she still laying out the same policy proposals America rejected last year? Why does she keep teasing us with promises to tell us about her “mistakes,” without ever following through? Why all the ordinary-citizen tales from the Just-So Stories of Big Government, the ones along the lines of: “Then I met Jill Shlabotnik, a humble weasel rancher from Sarasota, Florida…Jill told me how [sorrow, tears, pain, injustice] . . . and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we urgently need a 5.7 percent increase in deputy assistant EPA administrators!”

This is the norm for convention speeches, not for campaign autopsies, especially not one written from the point of view of the corpse. “In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I’m letting my guard down,” Clinton writes. Tantalizing! But there’s almost nothing she couldn’t or wouldn’t have said when she had to maintain her political viability, almost nothing she couldn’t or wouldn’t have said in one of those eyeball-glazers she called speeches, almost no instances where she takes stock of her flaws, except in the disingenuous manner of a job interviewee — “My biggest failing? I guess it’s just that I’m so focused that sometimes I can’t let work go, you know?” In Hillary’s case? “I had been unable to connect with the deep anger so many Americans felt,” “I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out positions. . . . Trump was running a reality TV show,” and (my favorite): “It’s true that I’ve always been more comfortable talking about others rather than myself. . . . I had to actively try to use the word I more.” Her big flaws are that she’s so even-tempered, thoughtful, substantive, and humble.

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MELANIE PHILLIPS ON “HELLO REFUGEES!” BY TUVIA TENENBOM

By on September 18th, 2017

Tuvia Tenenbom, that most acute and incendiary observer of what’s festering beneath the surface of polite society, has turned his attention to Germany’s “refugees”. To his surprise and no little dismay, what he has found out is not so much about these migrants but about Germany itself, and it isn’t pretty at all.http://www.melaniephillips.com/hello-refugees/

In his new book Hello Refugees, he adopts his now familiar but no less devastating tactic of trading on his blond hair, Falstaffian girth and indeterminate accent to conceal the fact that he was born and brought up in an ultra-orthodox family in Israel. He derives his unique insights from the fact that many of those to whom he addresses his faux-naïf but devastatingly direct questions assume he is an antisemite — just like them. And so they open up to him in a uniquely frank manner.

In Hello Refugees “Toby the German”, his previous persona, has become “Toby the Jordanian”. Posing as the son of Jordanian and European parentage, he uses his fluent Arabic to gain access to refugee camps in Germany where access is routinely denied to the media.

What he discovers shocks him deeply. He finds migrants effectively warehoused in wholly inadequate conditions, housed twelve to a “room” in what are no more than, and indeed described as, “containers”. Existing on disgusting food, jobless and with no apparent means of emerging from these holding pens, these migrants have in effect been abandoned by the German state.

Everywhere he goes, people tell him the same thing: that Chancellor Angela Merkel famously invited in more than one million migrants in order to erase the moral stain of Germany’s Nazi past. He concludes that this was not an act of conscience. How could it have been when these people have been left so abandoned? It was instead a move to show the world — and themselves — that this former Nazi state has become the world’s conscience. In other words, it was a cynical move that evacuates the word conscience of all meaning.

Worse than that, Tenenbom also discovers that this public advertisement of collective “conscience” has legitimised and provoked open antisemitism. Repeatedly and gratuitously, Germans tell him that they are now morally superior to the Jews and to the State of Israel which is described as uniquely racist and murderous.

He doesn’t get any of this from the Syrian refugees or other migrants. He gets it only from the Germans. He finds that “anti-racist”, “human rights” activists extolling Germany’s humanitarian gesture and calling for yet more refugees to be allowed in are in fact deep-dyed racists and antisemites.

Tenenbom knew already that Germany is still teeming with Jew-hatred; he has remorselessly chronicled this dismal finding in his previous work. But now, he tells me, it’s much more open and brazen. And that, he says, is because the act of taking in the migrants has allowed Germany to feel it has finally shaken off the stigma of its past. Now it is free to hate Jews again.

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BRITAIN’S ALARMING ANTISEMITISM PROBLEM : MELANIE PHILLIPS

By on September 18th, 2017

In 2002, on the BBC TV show Question Time, I was accused of dual loyalty in front of a jeering studio audience. My crime had been to defend Israel against demonization and double standards by both the audience and other members of the panel.http://www.melaniephillips.com/britains-alarming-antisemitism-problem/

At that time I had visited Israel only twice in my life, two years previously. No matter. A British Jew defending Israel was – and is – immediately accused in some quarters of incipient treachery toward Britain, just as throughout history antisemites have accused Diaspora Jews of dual loyalty or treachery merely because they are Jews.

I thought of my own experience, of course, when I read the report on antisemitism in the UK published this week by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.

There is currently much disquiet over the Labour Party’s conspicuous failure to address significant antisemitism within its ranks. But there has long been far wider concern among many British Jews about the antisemitic discourse, harassment and physical attacks which have become sickeningly commonplace in Britain over the past few years.

The report’s author, Daniel Staetsky, describes a situation which is complex.

Only around 5% of the population are out-and-out antisemites holding multiple anti-Jewish attitudes. Nevertheless, about 30% subscribe to some kind of antisemitic views.

The key is Staetsky’s distinction between antisemites and antisemitism. For while the number of antisemites is very small, the amount of antisemitism diffused throughout British society is much greater.

That’s because, while people may not feel personal hostility toward Jews, they may believe certain things which are in themselves antisemitic. As Staetsky says: “Antisemitic ideas are not as marginal in Great Britain as some measures of antisemitism suggest, and they can be held with and without open dislike of Jews.”

As a result, the probability for a British Jew of encountering “potentially offensive or, at the very least, uncomfortable” views is about one in three. That’s high.

Staetsky states, however, that 70% of British people hold a “favorable” attitude toward Jews. He reaches that optimistic figure, though, only by reducing respondents’ options to categorize their attitudes. When offered more options, the scenario for British Jews becomes less rosy: only around 39% have “somewhat” or “very” favorable opinions of Jews, more than 5% are classed as “somewhat” or “very” unfavorable and nearly 56% are classed as neither favorable nor unfavorable or as “didn’t know.”

Two groups are shown to be principally responsible for problematic attitudes: Muslims and the Left.

While “significant proportions of Muslims reject all such prejudice,” antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes are two to four times higher among Muslims than in the general population.

And contrary to the claim by those on the Left that they can’t be antisemitic because they are opposed to racism and fascism, the report says levels of antisemitism on the Left are “indistinguishable” from in the rest of the population.

When it comes to Israel, however, the Left is worse. Even those who are “slightly left-of-center” or “fairly left-wing” are more anti-Israel than the general population, while the more left-wing people are the more they hate Israel. You don’t say!

Moreover, says Staetsky, while only 12% of the population are out-and-out Israel-bashers, close to a quarter of Britons believe, to some extent at least, that Israel is deliberately trying to wipe out the Palestinian population, and about one in five that Israel is an apartheid state.

These are huge numbers for such poisonous lies. And no fewer than 56% hold at least one anti-Israel attitude.

So as Staetsky says, the feeling among so many Jews that they encounter anti-Israel positions all the time becomes immediately comprehensible.

The true extent of antisemitism has, of course, been masked by claims that being anti-Israel is not the same as being anti-Jew. Staetsky, however, states: “The existence of an association between the antisemitic and the anti-Israel attitudes tested is unambiguous.”

Moreover, the stronger the hostility to Israel the more likely it is to be accompanied by antisemitic attitudes such as that “Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes.” And that correlation puts left-wing Israel-bashers squarely in the antisemitism camp.

Staetsky makes the link solely through a statistical overlap between anti-Israel and antisemitic attitudes. I’d go further. Anti-Israel discourse has exactly the same unique characteristics as antisemitism.

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Ian Buruma: A Jihad Apologist at the Helm of the New York Review of Books By Bruce Bawer

By on September 18th, 2017

The New York Review of Books was founded during a newspaper strike in 1963 and was edited by Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers until her death in 2006, then edited solely by Silvers until he died earlier this year. Throughout its existence, it’s been the object of obsequious praise. I never got it. From the time I was in college, wandering the aisles of the library’s periodicals section and excitedly perusing one literary journal after another, I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the NYRB. It somehow managed to make everything dull: with few exceptions (Gore Vidal, Joan Didion), the articles all read as if they were written by some fusty old Oxbridge don who was also what the Brits call a champagne socialist.

Tom Wolfe, in his famous 1970 essay “Radical Chic,” called the NYRB “[t]he chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic.” In 1967, it printed a diagram showing how to make a Molotov cocktail. Later it spun off a sister rag, the London Review of Books, which after 9/11 published what must have been one of the most reprehensible issues of a magazine ever to see print: the contributors all sought to outdo one another in blaming the terrorist attacks on U.S. imperialism and capitalism.

In The Last Intellectuals (1987), Russell Jaboby described the NYRB as a closed shop that kept publishing the same big-name leftists (Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, I.F. Stone, Tony Judt) and that ran so many British professors that it was redolent more of “Oxford teas rather than New York delis.” Also, it had no interest in developing younger talent. (I must have sensed that, because when I left grad school and started writing for New York literary journals, I don’t think I even tried the NYRB.) In a 2014 article, Jacoby raised a question: although Silvers, then eighty-four, had been “unwilling or unable to groom successors,” eventually “he will have to give up the reins, but when and who will take over?”

The answer came this year. Silvers died, presenting an opportunity to open the NYRB up to non-academic – and even non-leftist! – writers living on the far side of the Hudson. No such luck: it was soon announced that Silvers’s job would be filled by Ian Buruma, a Dutch-born Oxford fellow who is sixty-five and has been a NYRB writer since 1987. For me, above all, he’s the man who wrote Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006), pretty much the only book about the Islamization of Europe to receive the imprimatur of the New York literary establishment.

Buruma had been critical of Islam. But in Murder in Amsterdam, a survey of Dutch critics and defenders of Islam, he fell into total PC lockstep on the subject. It was a disgraceful display. As I put it in my own book Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009), he strove “to make the supporters of jihadist butchery look sensitive, reflective, and reasonable, and to make people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali – who saw that butchery for what it was and who had no interest in trying to finesse it away – look inflexible, hard-nosed, and egoistic.”

He wrote about Hirsi Ali’s devotion to freedom as if it were a psychological disorder; for his part, he believed that the Netherlands should tacitly allow behavior on the part of Muslims – such as the oppression of Muslim women by Muslim men – that it would never accept from non-Muslims.

That book wasn’t the end of it: in 2007, the New York Times Magazine published a glowing profile by Buruma of Tariq Ramadan, the slippery champion of so-called “Euro-Islam.”

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4 U.S. Women Hit by Acid Attack in France By Aurelien Breedensept

By on September 18th, 2017

PARIS — Four American college students were attacked with acid by a woman on Sunday at a train station in southern France, injuring at least two of them, according to the local police.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/world/europe/marseille-france-acid-attack.html?mcubz=0

The assailant, a 41-year-old woman, was quickly arrested in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille. The police prefecture said they were not treating the attack on the American women as a terrorist assault.

The suspect has “a psychiatric history,” a spokeswoman for the police prefecture in Marseille said. “For now, nothing suggests that this was a terrorist attack.”

The four American women, all in their early 20s, were in front of the Saint-Charles train station when a woman threw hydrochloric acid on them shortly before 11 a.m., the police said.

Two of the women were burned, and the other two appeared to have escaped injury, but they were in a state of shock, according to police. All four were treated at a hospital on Sunday.

Boston College said in a statement on Sunday that the four women were students at the college and were enrolled in study-abroad programs. They were identified as Courtney Siverling, Charlotte Kaufman, Michelle Krug and Kelsey Kosten, all juniors.

Nick Gozik, who directs Boston College’s Office of International Programs, said in an email that the women had “recently arrived to start the fall semester.”

In the college’s statement, he added, “It appears that the students are fine, considering the circumstances, though they may require additional treatment for burns.”

The prosecutor’s office could not be reached for comment, but told France 3 that one of the women had been hit in the eye with acid and had trouble seeing.

France has been on high alert for terrorism since 2015, after a series of attacks killed more than 230 people. There have also been a number of attacks by psychologically unstable residents who have sometimes imitated terrorist acts, officials say.

La Provence, the main local newspaper, quoted police sources as saying that after the attack, the suspect had displayed pictures of herself with burns on her body. The prosecutor’s office said the suspect also had a criminal record for violent theft, according to France 3.

In 2013, two American women, Kirstie Trup and Katie Gee, both 18, who were teaching on the island of Zanzibar, were attacked with acid by two men on a moped who stopped, smiled and doused them, severely burning their faces, chests and hands, before speeding away.

In London this year, two teenage boys went on a violent, 72-minute spree in the northeast, spraying acid on five people, the authorities said. The teenagers were arrested on suspicion of robbery and of causing grievous bodily harm.

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The Terrible American Turn Toward Illiberalism Can it be reversed? Sohrab Ahmari

By on September 18th, 2017

A merica is at culture war. The battle lines and formations are starkly visible: coastal versus inland, urban versus rural, “globalist” versus nationalist, Black Lives versus Blue Lives, pussy hats versus MAGA caps, antifa versus alt-right. There is no third camp, the partisans say. One must pick a side. Forgive me for declining to do so, seeing as neither side stands for a positive principle worth going to war over.

Writing in these pages last year (“Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis,” July/August 2016), I described this surge of intemperate politics as a global phenomenon, a crisis of illiberalism stretching from France to the Philippines and from South Africa to Greece. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, I argued, were articulating American versions of this growing challenge to liberalism. By “liberalism,” I was referring not to the left or center-left but to the philosophy of individual rights, free enterprise, checks and balances, and cultural pluralism that forms the common ground of politics across the West.

Less a systematic ideology than a posture or sensibility, the new illiberalism nevertheless has certain core planks. Chief among these are a conspiratorial account of world events; hostility to free trade and finance capital; opposition to immigration that goes beyond reasonable restrictions and bleeds into virulent nativism; impatience with norms and procedural niceties; a tendency toward populist leader-worship; and skepticism toward international treaties and institutions, such as NATO, that provide the scaffolding for the U.S.-led postwar order.

The new illiberals, I pointed out, all tend to admire established authoritarians to varying degrees. Trump, along with France’s Marine Le Pen and many others, looks to Vladimir Putin. For Sanders, it was Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, where, the Vermont socialist said in 2011, “the American dream is more apt to be realized.” Even so, I argued, the crisis of illiberalism traces mainly to discontents internal to liberal democracies.

Trump’s election and his first eight months in office have confirmed the thrust of my predictions, if not all of the policy details. On the policy front, the new president has proved too undisciplined, his efforts too wild and haphazard, to reorient the U.S. government away from postwar liberal order.

The courts blunted the “Muslim ban.” The Trump administration has reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to defend treaty partners in Europe and East Asia. Trumpian grumbling about allies not paying their fair share—a fair point in Europe’s case, by the way—has amounted to just that. The president did pull the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but even the ultra-establishmentarian Hillary Clinton went from supporting to opposing the pact once she figured out which way the Democratic winds were blowing. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which came into being nearly a quarter-century ago, does look shaky at the moment, but there is no reason to think that it won’t survive in some modified form.

Yet on the cultural front, the crisis of illiberalism continues to rage. If anything, it has intensified, as attested by the events surrounding the protest over a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. The president refused to condemn unequivocally white nationalists who marched with swastikas and chanted “Jews will not replace us.” Trump even suggested there were “very fine people” among them, thus winking at the so-called alt-right as he had during the campaign. In the days that followed, much of the left rallied behind so-called antifa (“anti-fascist”) militants who make no secret of their allegiance to violent totalitarian ideologies at the other end of the political spectrum.

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Climate Change Hype Doesn’t Help The bigger issue than global warming is that more people are choosing to live in coastal areas. By Ryan Maue

By on September 18th, 2017

Mr. Maue, a research meteorologist, is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

“The historical record books contain dozens of devastating hurricane landfalls over the past century, any of which, if repeated, would be catastrophic regardless of additional climate-change effects. To prepare for the next hurricane, the U.S. needs the best weather forecasts, evacuation plans and leadership. These plans should be built on sound science, not speculation, overselling or exaggeration. Hurricane science in this political climate already has enough spin.”

As soon as Hurricanes Harvey and Irma made landfall in the U.S., scientists, politicians and journalists began to discuss the role of climate change in natural disasters. Although a clear scientific consensus has emerged over the past decade that climate change influences hurricanes in the long run, its effect upon any individual storm is unclear. Anyone trying to score political points after a natural disaster should take a deep breath and review the science first.

As a meteorologist with access to the best weather-forecast model data available, I watched each hurricane’s landfall with particular interest. Harvey and Irma broke the record 12-year major hurricane landfall drought on the U.S. coastline. Since Wilma in October 2005, 31 major hurricanes had swirled in the North Atlantic but all failed to reach the U.S. with a Category 3 or higher intensity.

Even as we worked to divine exactly where the hurricanes would land, a media narrative began to form linking the devastating storms to climate change. Some found it ironic that states represented by “climate deniers” were being pummeled by hurricanes. Alarmists reveled in the irony that Houston, home to petrochemical plants, was flooded by Harvey, while others gleefully reported that President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago might be inundated by Irma.

How to put these two hurricanes into proper context? An informative website from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, synthesizes reams of research literature on the links between hurricanes and global warming. Over the next century, climate models generally indicate fewer but stronger storms—between 2% and 11% greater average storm intensity—with substantially increased rain rates. Against the background of slow sea-level rise, explosive coastal population growth will overwhelmingly exacerbate any hurricane’s damages. In the aggregate, the global-warming signal may just now be emerging out of our noisy observational records, and we may not know certainly for several decades. These conclusions are hardly controversial in the climate-science community.

My own research, cited in a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, found that during the past half-century tropical storms and hurricanes have not shown an upward trend in frequency or accumulated energy. Instead they remain naturally variable from year-to-year. The global prevalence of the most intense storms (Category 4 and 5) has not shown a significant upward trend either. Historical observations of extreme cyclones in the 1980s, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, are in sore need of reanalysis.

By focusing on whether climate change caused a hurricane, journalists fail to appreciate the complexity of extreme weather events. While most details are still hazy with the best climate modeling tools, the bigger issue than global warming is that more people are choosing to live in coastal areas, where hurricanes certainly will be most destructive.

CONTINUE AT SITE

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Palestinians Imprison Journalists for Exposing Corruption by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on September 18th, 2017

Harb’s ordeal began in June 2016, when she published an investigative report that disclosed how Hamas and the Palestinian Authority were using medical care to blackmail Palestinian patients. Her report exposed how some physicians and Hamas and Palestinian Authority officials were demanding bribes in return for issuing permits to patients to leave the Gaza Strip for medical treatment in Israel, the West Bank and Arab and Western countries. Those who cannot afford to pay the bribes are left to die in understaffed and under equipped Palestinian hospitals.

Instead of launching an investigation against those involved in the corruption scandal, Hamas chose to punish the journalist who revealed how patients were being mistreated and abused by senior health officials.

Hajer Harb, a courageous Palestinian journalist, has been found guilty by Hamas of exposing corruption in the health system in the Gaza Strip. On September 13, a Hamas court sentenced her to six months in prison and a fine. It was the first sentence of its kind to be passed on a female journalist in the Gaza Strip.

Harb, however, is unlikely to serve her prison term in the near future; she recently left the Gaza Strip to Jordan, where she is receiving medical treatment after being diagnosed with cancer.

Her illness, however, did not stop Hamas from pursuing legal measures against her for her role in exposing corruption in the Palestinian health system. Instead of suspending the legal proceedings against her, the Hamas court chose to sentence her to prison in absentia.

When and if she recovers from her illness and returns to the Gaza Strip, Harb will be arrested and sent to prison for six months. She will also be required to pay the 1000 shekel ($250) fine that was imposed on her by the Hamas court.

Harb’s ordeal began in June 2016, when she published an investigative report that disclosed how Hamas and the Palestinian Authority were using medical care to blackmail Palestinian patients. Her report exposed how some physicians and Hamas and Palestinian Authority officials were demanding bribes in return for issuing permits to patients to leave the Gaza Strip for medical treatment in Israel, the West Bank and some Arab and Western countries. Those who cannot afford to pay the bribes are left to die in understaffed and under equipped Palestinian hospitals, the report revealed.

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Geert Wilders: “In My Opinion, Islam Is Not a Religion” by Telegraaf and Geert Wilders

By on September 18th, 2017

“Not long ago Professor Koopmans found that as much as seventy percent of Muslims find Islamic rules more important than secular laws.” – Geert Wilders.

“Research also points out that 11 percent of Dutch Muslims in the Netherlands are prepared to use violence on behalf of their religion. That is a 110,000 people, twice the size of the Dutch army!” – Geert Wilders.

I personally believe there are extremist people and moderate people. But I do not believe in two kinds of Islam. There is only one…. You get your head chopped off should you wish to interpret Islam…. People who want to come to the Netherlands from Islamic countries should think: this is not a place we want to go to! And we do not do this to bully Muslims, but to keep the Netherlands of the future a free Netherlands.” – Geert Wilders.

Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders is deeply concerned about Muslim integration. In our series Islam in the Netherlands he is warning about the “perishing”of our culture. “It is not five to twelve or two to twelve, it is almost morning!” The leader of the second party in the country is pondering about very far-reaching measures.

Geert Wilders (54) is not surprised at the shocking poll results released by daily newspaper De Telegraaf. The fact that only thirteen percent of the Dutch population feel that the problem of integration will solve itself is a writing on the wall, according to him. And that only eleven percent of the Dutch see Islam as an enrichment proves in his opinion that what he has been calling for years. “If I had said that three years ago, I would have had tens of thousands of police reports thrown at me. But people are completely fed up with it. ”

How do you explain the figures?

“Decades ago, a few thousand people from Islamic countries would stay temporarily. But temporarily turned out to be permanently. Those thousands of guest workers became hundreds of thousands. And in Europe millions of people by now. Back then those people were called upon to integrate and assimilate. But Islam, the word says it already, seeks to dominate. Not long ago Professor Koopmans found that as much as seventy percent of Muslims find Islamic rules more important than secular laws. In Europe almost weekly innocent people are slaughtered in name of Allah and Islam. Proudly. We have been declared war and we refuse to defend ourselves.”

Who is responsible for this?

“I think that probably the worst of all is that Western European politicians have allowed this to happen. Last week Sybrand Buma of the Christian democratic party CDA was suddenly critical of Islam. That is like a bank robber who, twenty years after the robbery, has spent all the money and apologizes for doing so. He is the one who did it. CDA has been in power in the Netherlands for 50 years. ”

Is it not a bit blunt to say …

“No!”

… that Muslims do not integrate?

“I am talking about Islam. But research also points out that 11 percent of Dutch Muslims in the Netherlands are prepared to use violence on behalf of their religion. That is a 110,000 people, twice the size of the Dutch army! ”

But perhaps many Muslims in fact take Islam less serious and profess their faith behind the front door, peacefully. Secretary Asscher of Integration said in this paper last week that those people should not be held accountable for terrorist attacks.

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