Displaying the most recent of 92221 posts written by

Ruth King

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Once Upon a Time in the West by Edward Cline

By on March 30th, 2017

Imagine my surprise when I learned that many British government buildings are being subsidized by Sharia finance, and therefore come under Sharia law. The Daily Mail ran this revealing story just after the London-Westminster Bridge attack. This is an instance of abject submission to Islam.

Will the Royal Coat of Arms give

Way to the Islamic Crescent?

Admiralty House is one of two more public buildings that are revealed today to operate under Islamic law following the revelations that government properties were quietly transferred to finance an Islamic bond scheme in 2014.

In addition to two Department of Health buildings and the Department of International Development property on Whitehall, the bond scheme also covers Admiralty House and an unidentified building at 4-26 Webber Street in Southwark, south London.

It takes the total number of government buildings that were transferred to fund the £200million Islamic finance scheme to five.

But no imbibing of alcohol will be allowed, per Sharia . Doubtless down the road, criticizing Islam will not be permitted or you’ll be fined or attacked. No pork products to be sold or consumed on the “new’ premises. No British beef will be served unless it’s halal.

Under the terms of the lease, the sale of alcohol is one of the activities banned on the premises because they must conform to Sharia law.

George Osborne announced the move in June 2014 as part of an effort to make the UK a global hub for Islamic finance.

But critics said the scheme would waste money and could undermine Britain’s financial and legal systems by imposing Sharia law onto government premises.

Due to the Islamic bond scheme – known as Sukuk – the ownership of the leases on the five government buildings have been switched from British taxpayers to wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen and banks.

The money raised will be repayable from 2019. But instead of interest, bond-buyers will earn rental income from the Government offices because interest payments are banned in Sharia law…..

Submission to Islam will be painless if you’re willing to lease your property (or the British taxpayers’ property) to the government per the “generous” terms established by wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen and banks.

The money raised will be repayable from 2019. But instead of interest, bond-buyers will earn rental income from the Government offices because interest payments are banned in Sharia law.

Leave it to the British government to sell out its own citizens. And also to the Canadiangovernment to sell out its real citizens, not the “refugees” in whose name the Parliament there seems to legislate Specially targeted: “Islamphobic” speech.

Will the Maple Leaf be replaced

with the Islamic Crescent?

for, and against freedom of speech.

Politicians in Canada moved forward a motion, with a vote of 201 to 91, that gives Islam special protections under hate speech laws. (M103)

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on board with the motion.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In Praise of Paranoia by Tom McCaffrey

By on March 30th, 2017

“Deep-state holdovers embedded like barnacles in the federal bureaucracy are hell-bent on destroying President Trump.” So said Sean Hannity recently, and Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal took him to task for it. Stephens accused Hannity of right-wing paranoia. He quoted Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” and asked whether Hofstadter’s description applies to the right wing mindset of today:

“America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesman who are at the very centers of American power.”

By the time Hofstadter wrote these words, progressives had already gone a long way toward transforming the political system of the United States. As the Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood it, a primary purpose of government is to secure the property rights of individuals, which they believed are the foundation of all other rights. (Try to imagine freedom of the press without privately owned newspapers, or freedom of religion – in a country that is expelling religion from the public square – without privately owned church buildings on privately owned land.) This purpose manifested itself most broadly in the structure of the Constitution, which was intended to limit the power of democratic majorities, correctly regarded by the Framers as the greatest threat to private property and, thus, to individual liberty.

But in the early 20th century, the progressives set out to make America more democratic – through the 17th Amendment, for example, which substituted popular election of U.S. senators for their selection by the respective state legislatures. Their purpose in democratizing America was not to empower the people, but, rather, to “democratically” abolish the Constitutional barriers that had kept property rights secure for a century, thus freeing governments at all levels to intervene in the economic affairs of the nation, legislating wages, working conditions, hours of employment, and countless other matters.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Two Netanyahus Meet Two Trumps by Rael Jean Isaac

By on March 30th, 2017

One of the most widely accepted misconceptions concerning the Arab-Israel conflict (a subject awash in misconceptions) is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a “hard-core right winger.” There is nothing in his behavior as Prime Minister during his first years in that role (1997-99) or in his more recent period in office, beginning in 2009, to support this belief. On the contrary, like his predecessors, he has made repeated dramatic territorial and other concessions, including acceptance of the so-called “two state solution.”

In Jan. 1997, still in the first year of his first term, he signed the Hebron Protocol with the Palestine Authority, turning over most of Hebron, after Jerusalem the most important city in Jewish history, to the PA. Netanyahu did so little to change Labor’s disastrous post-Oslo policy that erstwhile supporter Benny Begin (Menachem’s son) derided him at a Likud Party meeting in March of that year. “Arafat releases terrorists and so does Israel. Arafat smuggles in weapons and we give him assault rifles to round off his stores….We have government offices in Jerusalem [supposedly the unified capital of Israel] and so do they.” The following year, under President Clinton’s prodding, Netanyahu signed the Wye River Memorandum in which he promised to turn over 40% of Judea and Samaria to Arafat, a safe corridor between these areas and Gaza, even an airport in Gaza. It is true Wye was not implemented, but that’s only because (predictably) Arafat promptly reneged on his commitments under the agreement.

That same year Netanyahu embarked on secret negotiations with Syria in which he offered to return the Golan Heights. Was Netanyahu prepared to go back to the 1967 border (which Clinton and Dennis Ross assert in their respective memoirs) or did Netanyahu, according to other reports, hold out for several kilometers beyond the international border line? Although Assad backed out, according to widespread reports in the Israeli press, in 2010 Netanyahu tried again, this time with Bashar Assad, offering to return to the June 4, 1967 lines. Fortunately the negotiations collapsed with the onset of the rebellion against the Syrian ruler. (One shudders to think what “success” would have meant for Israel, with Hezbollah and/or ISIS embedded on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.)

That near miss with disaster has not prevented Netanyahu from continuing to offer major concessions. In the wake of Obama’s Cairo speech, Netanyahu agreed to adopt the “two state solution” as his government’s policy. Moreover, retired Brigadier General Michael Herzog (brother of Israeli Labor Party head Yitzhak Herzog), who has participated in almost all Israel’s peace negotiations since Oslo in 1993, writes in The American Interest that Netanyahu in the Obama years offered such large withdrawals that he could not admit their scale to the Israeli public or his coalition partners.

And contrary to the widespread perception, fostered by the media, that Netanyahu has peppered the landscape of Judea and Samaria with Jewish settlements, Israel has not built a new settlement in 25 years. The much publicized on and off settlement freezes to which Netanyahu has agreed applied to existing communities, the “freezes” meaning there was no building even to accommodate natural population growth within them.

So what accounts for Netanyahu’s reputation as an unbudging hawk? The reason is that he knows better than he acts with the result that his rhetoric differs from his policies far more than has been the case with other Israeli leaders. Prime Minister Shimon Peres seems clearly to have believed in the mirage he concocted of a New Middle East. Prime Minister Olmert appears to have genuinely felt the emotions which in 2005 (in a speech to the Israel Policy Forum) he attributed to the people of Israel as a whole: “We are tired of fighting; we are tired of being courageous; we are tired of winning; we are tired of defeating our enemies.”

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ISIS Shows French Jihadist Raising 9 Young Kids in Terror Group By Bridget Johnson

By on March 30th, 2017

A new ISIS video shows a French jihadist raising his nine small children to follow the terrorist group, the little girls cloaked in black abayas and the young boys dressed in military garb and ISIS caps.

The video released from Raqqa — the ISIS capital in Syria slowly being besieged by tens of thousands of fighters from the multiethnic, multisectarian Syrian Democratic Forces — is titled “The Islamic State: The Trustworthy Religion” and also chides Muslims enjoying Western life.

The Syrian citizen journalist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently identified the French ISIS member, who spoke his native tongue in the video, as Abu Yaqoub al-Fransi.

The Frenchman is shown pushing some of the kids on a swing and taking the boys to school, the 14-minute video painting his life as virtuous while slamming the Middle East version of “The Voice” reality show singing competition.

ISIS also mocks the YouTube-popular Arab desert pastime of surfing atop cars balanced on two wheels as an un-Islamic amusement.

ISIS also announced the launch of a new TV network in Raqqa, Al-Bayan, and showed a sample programming lineup. The group already had its Al-Bayan radio station, which is still broadcasting in Raqqa, including in English, but has been seized by Iraqi forces in Mosul. ISIS has long confiscated satellite dishes in occupied areas to try to control the media narrative, and the new video shows the ritual stomping and ax-hacking of broken satellite dish equipment.

Another foreign fighter is shown playing with his young kids in a park before teens are seen being sent off in armored vehicles to conduct suicide bombings. A boy at the end of the video breaks down in tears after describing his allegiance and singing a nasheed. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

RussiaGate: Hillary Clinton and John Podesta’s Troubling Ties to Russia By Debra Heine

By on March 30th, 2017

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and the author of “Clinton Cash,” explained on Fox News Tuesday how a Russia connection to the Clinton campaign and Obama presidency is much bigger and more troubling than anything Democrats have accused Team Trump of.

During his appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Schweizer alleged that Clinton campaign chair John Podesta probably violated federal law when he failed to disclose his stock holdings in a Kremlin-funded company.

“In 2011, John Podesta joins the board of this very small energy company called Joule Energy based out of Massachusetts,” Schweizer said. “About two months after he joins the board, a Russian entity called Rusnano puts a billion rubles — which is about 35 million dollars — into John Podesta’s company. Now, what is Rusnano? Rusnano is not a private company, Steve. It is a fund directly funded by the Kremlin. In fact, the Russian science minister called Rusnano Putin’s child. So you have the Russian government investing in one of John Podesta’s businesses in 2011, while he is an advisor to Hillary Clinton at the State Department.”

“Does anyone in Trump’s circle rise to the level where there’s this kind of money involved?” asked host Steve Doocy.

Schweizer answered that he hadn’t seen anything like that yet. “Nobody that has an advisory role in the White House has had this money exchange. And certainly the money hasn’t exchanged as far as we know while they have been advising the president,” he said, pointing out that while he was an advisor in the Obama White House, Podesta owned stock shares with “Putin’s Child” and failed to disclose it.

“So then in 2013, he goes to the White House, to be a special counselor to Barack Obama, and that requires that you, you know, have financial disclosures every year,” he explained. “In his financial disclosure form in 2013, he not only fails to disclose these 75,000 shares of stock that he has in Joule Energy, which is funded in part by the Russian government. He also fails to disclose that he is on one of the three corporate boards that this entity has. It’s got this very complex ownership structure. He discloses he is on the company in Massachusetts, that is he on the board of a company in the Netherlands, but he fails to disclose that he is also on the executive board of the holding company. That’s a clear violation of the disclosure rules that I think needs to be looked at.”

He added, “What makes the Podesta case clear is there was a transfer of money and there was a transfer of a lot of money that stood to make John Podesta a lot of money. That is unique and that’s extremely troubling because at the time that transfer is taking place he is advising Hillary Clinton at the State Department. We know that from the Podesta emails that he is helping her make personnel decisions, speech decisions, policy decisions. He is meeting with her monthly. It’s a transfer of money from a foreign government, at the time that he is advising America’s chief diplomat, Hillary Clinton.”

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Has Made Enough Sacrifices By Dan Calic

By on March 30th, 2017

One of the oft-repeated laments from many world leaders when speaking about the long-festering Arab-Israeli conflict is regarding sacrifices.

How many times did former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry, former president Obama, or other leaders talk about the need for both sides to make sacrifices for peace? We’ve heard it repeatedly. Yet the truth of the matter is that only one side has made sacrifices, while the other side has not made any. One side has continuously demonstrated its desire for peace, while the other side has continuously demonstrated it wants the other destroyed.

The Arab population makes up over 98% of the Middle East, while geographically covers more than 99% of the land compared to the size of Israel. These facts are merely to provide some perspective. Yet despite of the overwhelming advantage the Arab world enjoys, the tiny Jewish nation of Israel is considered intolerable by many.

List of Jewish Sacrifices

1. In June 1967, Israel was forced to defend itself against Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in the Six-Day War. During this decisive Israeli victory the Holy Old City of Jerusalem was captured from the Jordanians, who had been in control of it since the Independence war ended in 1949. The victory reunited the Jewish people with Temple Mount and the Western Wall of the Second Temple compound. Israeli flags flew over their holiest site for the first time in modern history.

Yet, at the conclusion of the war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made a huge sacrifice in the interest of peace by awarding administrative control of Temple Mount to the Jordanian Waqf (Islamic Trust). He ordered Israeli flags removed and he banned Jews from praying on Temple Mount. This remains in effect today. In spite of Israel’s sacrifice Temple Mount remains a flashpoint issue and numerous riots have taken place at Al Aqsa mosque.

In the same war Israel captured the Gaza Strip and virtually all of the Sinai Desert.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The World’s New Ideological Fault Line Runs Through France Presidential election is likely to pit nationalist Le Pen against globalist Macron By Greg Ip

By on March 30th, 2017

PARIS—In France as in most of the West, politics has long been dominated by a left wing and a right wing party. This year an earthquake is in the making: If current polls are borne out, neither the left-wing Socialists nor right-wing Republicans will make it past the first round of the presidential election in April.

Instead, two parties that have never held power will proceed to May’s runoff. And both agree their contest isn’t over traditional issues of right and left, such as taxes and spending. Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, says it’s between “globalists and patriots” or, as supporters of Emmanuel Macron, leader of the upstart En Marche (“Forward”) put it, “open and closed.”

That makes the French election the starkest and most consequential contest yet in the world’s ideological divide between nationalism and globalism.
The nationalists who led the British vote to leave the European Union and put Donald Trump in the White House operate within established conservative parties and thus co-exist uneasily with traditional free traders. The National Front arose outside the mainstream and espouses a more uncompromising, coherent rejection of economic, geopolitical and cultural integration. Ms. Le Pen wants to take France out of the EU and the euro, which could precipitate the collapse of both.France makes a singularly appropriate battlefield over nationalism. The modern nation state can be traced to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 when France, putting national interest ahead of religion, sided with Germany’s protestant princes to contain the power of the Catholic Holy Roman Empire. Three centuries later it switched places, choosing, with Germany, to subordinate sovereignty to an ever closer European Union. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

‘Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross’ Review: Photos From Inside The Holocaust Henryk Ross risked his life to document the daily life of Jews living in Poland’s Lodz Ghetto, hiding his images until the end of the war By William Meyers

By on March 30th, 2017

Boston

Jews have a way with catastrophe; the hundreds of images in “Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross” are testimony to it. Ross said, “Having an official camera, I was able to capture all the tragic period in the¼ Lodz Ghetto. I did it knowing that if I were caught my family and I would be tortured and killed.” Ross (1910-1991) was one of the only two Jews in the Ghetto allowed to have cameras; they were required to take pictures to be used by the Nazis for propaganda, but each also surreptitiously documented the deterioration and removal of the Ghetto’s inhabitants. It is a tradition that goes back to the prophet Jeremiah crying, “Alas,” over the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.
Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Through July 30

Very little is known for sure about Ross. He was apparently born in Warsaw and may have had a career there as a photojournalist of some sort. In 1939 he joined the Polish army, and when it was defeated he ended up in Lodz. In the middle of present-day Poland, Lodz was an important industrial city with a mixed population of Poles, Germans and Jews. With the Nazi conquest, the Jews were moved into a blighted section and physically segregated from the rest of the city. All Jews, eventually well over the original 160,000, were made to wear a yellow Star of David sewn on their clothes. The Germans found Ross’s name on the Photographers Association list and confiscated his camera, but when the Judenrat, the “Jewish council” set up by the Nazis for inhabitants to administer the Ghetto, was established, the camera was returned.

Ross was responsible for taking identity photos, recording the activities of the Judenrat, and documenting the factories established in the Ghetto in the hope that the Nazis would spare Jews doing productive work. Examples of these pictures were included in the 6,000 negatives Ross buried in the fall of 1944. “I buried my negatives in the ground in order that there should be some record of our tragedy….I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish Jewry. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom.” The negatives were in metal canisters placed in wooden boxes, but when they were retrieved in 1945, water had ruined half of them. The swirls and signs of deterioration on the prints made from the still usable ones are emblematic of the harrowing experiences of their subjects. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

David Friedman Sworn In as U.S. Ambassador to Israel Vice president says nomination shows ‘America stands with Israel’

By on March 30th, 2017

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump gained his first ambassador Wednesday when attorney David Friedman was sworn in as America’s envoy to Israel.

Vice President Mike Pence administered the oath of office to Mr. Friedman and hailed Mr. Trump’s decision to nominate his former bankruptcy attorney for the sensitive diplomatic post as “one of the clearest signs” of the president’s commitment to the state of Israel and the Jewish people.

“If the world knows nothing else, the world will know this: America stands with Israel,” Mr. Pence said as Mr. Friedman’s wife, Tammy, their five children and most of their grandchildren watched. Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., also attended the ceremony.
Mr. Friedman, whose nomination faced resistance from Democrats and some Jewish groups, said he was “humbled” by the trust Mr. Trump had placed in him. He also noted his standing as the first of Mr. Trump’s ambassador nominees to win Senate confirmation and be sworn in to office.

“Those facts speak volumes about how highly the Trump-Pence administration prioritizes our unbreakable bond with the state of Israel,” Mr. Friedman said.

He said he recently resigned from the law firm in which he was a founding partner.

The Senate approved Mr. Friedman’s nomination last week by a vote of 52-46, largely along party lines.
CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

The Nerds Who Make English The Merriam-Webster editor informs us that the German word for a lower-back tattoo is “Arschgeweih,” which literally means “ass antlers.” Henry Hitchings reviews “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries” by Kory Stamper.

By on March 30th, 2017

‘Lexicographer” is not a seductive word. Samuel Johnson famously defined it, more than 260 years ago, as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge.” His own “Dictionary of the English Language” belied this impression of soulless passivity, but the image has stuck. There is a common assumption that dictionaries are put together by faceless dullards. In the judgmental world of online dating, saying that you’re a lexicographer has all the aphrodisiac potency of admitting that you enjoy reorganizing your sock drawer.

Yet the reputation of lexicography is starting to change, and the main reason is the emergence of a new generation of word mavens who brighten social media with linguistic curios and discussion points. Among these is Kory Stamper, an editor at Merriam-Webster. That venerable firm of course takes half its name from Noah Webster, and one of Webster’s key statements was that “the business of a lexicographer is to collect, define, and arrange, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language.” As Ms. Stamper comments, modern practitioners shift the emphasis: Today the aspiration is “to collect, define, and arrange, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language.” After all, no dictionary can document everything.

Ms. Stamper’s responsibilities at Merriam-Webster include defining new words and revising out-of-date entries. She also appears in its “Ask the Editor” video series, where she holds forth on matters such as the correct plural of “octopus” and the question of whether Alanis Morissette’s song “Ironic” actually has anything to do with irony—two topics beloved of half-informed pedants. Meanwhile, on Twitter, where wholly uninformed pedants outnumber any other group, she is a voice of sassy realism, apt to celebrate “badass word-nerd women” or proffer golden nuggets of trivia, such as the fact that the German word for a lower-back tattoo is “Arschgeweih” (which literally means “ass antlers”).

In “Word by Word,” Ms. Stamper maintains this “nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty, worm’s-eye view.” We learn that her suitability for her chosen career revealed itself when she was a child. Growing up in Colorado, she devoured her parents’ hoarded catalogs. At age 9, having gorged on a medical dictionary, she alarmed her father by announcing, “I’m reading about scleroderma.” Though she doesn’t say so, learning about an ailment that causes hardening of the skin may have been useful preparation for a life of being teased by people who think that logophilia is itself an illness, not an endowment. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →