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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Op-Ed: Park Slope Food Coop – Stick to Food, Not Politics By Susan B. Tuchman, Esq. and Morton A. Klein

By on November 2nd, 2016

When the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn was founded in 1973, it had a worthy mission: to make healthy and affordable food available to everyone who wanted it. But recently, the Coop appears to have lost its way. In April, it suspended four loyal, long-time members for a whole year – three of them members from the Coop’s inception. The reason? Allegedly, the four disrupted a Coop meeting. But in reality, they were singled out from among hundreds of Coop members who vociferously objected to a hateful and bigoted anti-Israel presentation at a Coop meeting, which was aimed at getting the Coop to boycott an Israeli company called SodaStream.

This wasn’t the first time that an anti-Israel boycott was proposed at the Coop; the membership had already considered and soundly rejected one in 2012. But the Israel-bashers were persistent, this time displaying inflammatory anti-Israel photos at a Coop general meeting. The photos weren’t verified, they had no context, and the boycott proponents did not even establish their connection to SodaStream. Members at the meeting reported that not only was Israel viciously attacked; Jews were, too, with outrageous and incendiary comments like “Jews are aggressive toward black children.”

The four suspended Coop members were no doubt passionate and vocal about their objection to this anti-Israel boycott effort, and they had good reason to be: A boycott of Israeli products such as SodaStream would violate New York State law and could subject the Coop to liability.

New York’s Human Rights Law prohibits boycotts based on national origin, among several other protected categories. The law doesn’t require evidence of a formal boycott campaign; it’s enough if there’s a pattern of conduct that commercially disadvantages members of a protected class, which describes the anti-Israel vendetta at the Coop.The four suspended Coop members were no doubt passionate and vocal about their objection to this anti-Israel boycott effort, and they had good reason to be: A boycott of Israeli products such as SodaStream would violate New York State law and could subject the Coop to liability.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘BDS pogrom was like stormtroopers during 1930s’ Anti-Israel activists reportedly targeted female students making their way to pro-Israel event. David Rosenberg

By on November 2nd, 2016

Anti-Israel protesters who crashed a pro-Israel event in London last Thursday targeted female students planning to attend the event, physically attacking Jewish girls both on the way to and inside of the venue.

The event, held at the University College London, featured a talk by former IDF soldier Hen Mazzig.

As previously reported, BDS activists stormed the event, trapping participants in a room. Police ultimately intervened, warning those trapped not to attempt to leave the room before officers gained control of the situation.

The protesters, however, apparently did far more than merely trap those participating in the event.

According to The Algemeiner, the pro-BDS activists targeted female students both outside of and inside the event, physically attacking them in a scene a senior official at the Simon Wiesenthal Center said was reminiscent of pogroms by Nazi street gangs in the 1930s.

The guest of the event, Hen Mazzig, a former IDF officer and veteran who served in Judea and Samaria, said he was shocked by the assault.

“I don’t think that even in my days in the IDF it was as bad as it is right now. It’s really scary. I hear that they have been attacking some girls, Jewish girls that came to support and to [hear] my talk.”

Several female students, including Devora Khafi, director of the local Stand With US branch, and Liora Cadranel, co-president of the local Israel Society, told the Jewish Chronicle that protesters “weren’t afraid to hurt girls.”

Khafi said while she was accustomed to aggressive opposition by anti-Israel groups, the incident on Thursday “was unbelievable.”

“I go to a lot of Israel events. This one was very different. These people are not afraid to do anything. It was unbelievable. This was the worse experience I’ve ever had at an Israel event on campus.”

Later, in a letter obtained by The Algemeiner, the Simon Wiesenthal Center international relations director Shimon Samuels described the attacks to the UCL’s Vice Chancellor, writing that the scene was “redolent of a 1930s Nazi storm-trooper ‘pogrom,’ or of budding Jihadi volunteers serving ISIS on a British university campus.”

“The thugs first attacked female students on their way to the event…Their screams. ‘Intifada, Intifada, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ bore witness to their violent intent in championing the cause of a ‘Palestine’ built on the ruins of the state of Israel.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Reemergence of Tribalism By Herbert London President, London Center for Policy Research

By on November 2nd, 2016

For those who believe in a “one-world” thesis – the union of people in a harmonized legal system – these are unsettling days. Rather than singing kumbayah each morning, tribes are displaying a form of loyalty bred in the bone. In fact, tribalism is alive and well and driving political judgments across the globe.

Whether it is Brexit or the manifestation of the post Sykes-Picot Middle East geography, tribalism reigns. If tribalism is defined as variable combinations of kinship, reciprocal exchange, economic circumstances, then the desire to impose an overlay of internationalism or globalization is bound to face formidable opposition. Intense feelings of common identity promote tribal connections.

While a full-scale analysis of the Brexit vote has not yet occurred, my suspicion is that tribal factors, namely class and station, had a profound effect on the vote. There was a union of culture in Britain, a subterranean belief that the elitists working in financial emporiums in London didn’t have the foggiest idea of how ordinary people are obliged to deal with the migration issue or even the pettifogging matter of requirements for electric product use.

Globalization has hastened the reemergence of tribalism, in large part, because of a public refusal to accept homogenization. The obvious point that people aren’t all the same is lost on supra-democrats who believe they can and should impose their will on an uninterested and ignorant populace.

Although the setting is different from the UK, tribalism was and remains the definitive character of the Middle East. Attempts to impose national structure on tribes only works to the extent each of the tribes believes it is being treated fairly. It turns out that appeals to nationalism rest on this thin reed. When consensus breaks down, as it did in Iraq and Syria, tribal warfare ensues.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Now They are Going After Jewish Summer Camps By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

By on November 2nd, 2016

Camp owners were shocked by the comparison of Jewish campers emulating IDF exercises with Hamas terrorist training camps.http://www.jewishpress.com/news/us-news/ny/now-they-are-going-after-jewish-summer-camps/2016/11/02/

Camp Mesorah is a co-educational Modern Orthodox sleep-over camp sprawling across more than 100 acres in New York State’s Catskill Mountains. The camp focuses on sports, Torah, Jewish unity and love for Medinat Yisrael. Some people can’t stand that last part – especially any suggestion that the Israeli Defense Forces should be respected and emulated.

Why? Because the IDF, you know, is a military force and if Jewish campers in upstate New York emulate IDF troops while engaging in team-building and obstacle courses, that really is akin to glorifying torture and violence. In fact, “it’s like the Hamas camps.” At least that’s what some non-affiliated busybodies are claiming.

It’s absurd, but that’s how some Israel-denigrators – even Jewish ones – play the game. Even when it comes to attacking a team-building summer activity for Jewish campers.

Founded in 1990, Mesorah hosts approximatly 800 campers throughout the summers, starting from rising fourth graders through the tenth grade. Nearly one hundred of those Mesorahans come from Israel, and the camp has strong Zionist roots. Campers are encouraged to learn about and learn to love Israel, and making Aliyah is viewed as a positive aspiration. As Joseph Stansky, Mesorah’s co-owner, told the JewishPress.com on Tuesday, “many campers have IDF t-shirts and sweatshirts which they bought at novelty shops on Ben Yehudah [Street in Jerusalem].”

A brief visit to the camp’s website reveals hockey rinks and basketball courts, baseball diamonds and tennis courts, a lake for boating, and two shuls, a kollel, learning gazebos and a library. The owners have brought the camp into the digital age with a section on the website for parents and other family members to regularly see pictures and videos of the campers. There are also promotional videos for interested families.

The promotional videos are rolled out one at a time over the course of the post-summer year, in anticipation of the next summer’s season. One video rolled out just after the Jewish holidays this year focused on the camp’s “IDF-Paintball Program,” which shows campers in camouflage gear engaged in an intensive (by American Jewish camp standards) obstacle and team building course. Many of the campers are wearing their IDF t-shirts.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

WikiLeaks Reveals Clinton Poll Oversampling Scheme By Frank Salvato

By on November 2nd, 2016

As we approach Election Day, there will be an incredible amount of talk about the polls. Mainstream media pundits will expound on the lead that Hillary Clinton has and how it is something that, in the short time left, can’t be overcome by Donald Trump. But is this “lead” that Hillary Clinton is said to possess and accurate reflection of the electorate?

Emails released by WikiLeaks last week prove that the Clinton team applied an enormous amount of pressure (as if it were needed) on the mainstream media into systematically and deliberately over-sampling Clinton-friendly demographics in their polling. The emails, that originated with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, included a detailed 37-page manual on how to go about most effectively skewing the polling results so as to give the Clinton campaign the numbers they needed to claim a lead.

It was their game plan all along to propagandize huge leads in the polls – through the Clinton-friendly mainstream media – to depress voter turnout for Donald Trump. A simple reading of Podesta’s email and the attached manual prove this beyond any doubt.

This is the inherent danger in a politically corrupt; a politically biased mainstream media. By creating “scientific polls” that, through the use of oversampling, skew the perception of a candidate’s popularity, they are manipulating the masses into thinking there is no reason to show up at the polls. To date, or at least until WikiLeaks exposed the scheme, the Clinton team strategy was working.

This scheme of the Clinton campaign to propagandize the polling data just before Election Day, quite successful until it was exposed, is exactly what Donald Trump and his surrogates are talking about when they make the argument that “the system is rigged.”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Clintons — At the End of All Things Epic greed, power, and pride: Where’s the bottom? With Bill and Hillary, there’s no telling. By Victor Davis Hanson —

By on November 1st, 2016

What was the Clinton telos? The end point, the aim of all their lying, cheating, criminality, dishonor, and degradation?

Given the latest Wiener scandals coming on top of the latest WikiLeaks scandals, we wonder, what did the Clintons really wish to end up as — and why? Are they Goethe’s Faust or tortured souls crushed by the weight of their money bags in Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell?

For a few criminals, remorse comes with old age; but for the Clintons, near-70 was to be the capstone, the last chance to trump all their prior shenanigans. They were artists of amorality, and the election of 2016 was to be their magnum opus.

Collate the FBI reopened investigation, WikiLeaks Podesta trove, revelations about the Clinton Foundation, the e-mail–server scandal, the DNC disclosures, and the various off-the-cuff campaign remarks of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and one then ponders what was the point of the Clinton shakedowns, the loss of reputation, the crude lawbreaking, as they neared their seventh decade. To paraphrase Barack Obama, in his progressive sermonizing on making enough money, did the two ever think they had enough money, enough honors, enough power already?

The Hillary/Bill fortune — generated by pay-for-play influence peddling on the proposition that Bill would return to the White House under Hillary’s aegis and reward friends while punishing enemies — hit a reported $150 million some time ago, a fortune built not on farming, mining, insurance, finance, high-tech, or manufacturing, but on skimming off money. The Clintons are simply grifters whose insider access to government gave them the power to make rich people richer.

Long gone was the Scrooge-like need to write off used underwear as charitable tax deductions or to play 4-trillion-to-one odds in rigging a $100,000 cattle-futures profit on a $1,000 “investment,” or Hillary’s decade-and-a-half as a corporate lawyer masquerading as a children’s advocate. How pathetic the minor league Whitewater cons must seem now to the multimillionaire Clintons — such a tawdry ancient example of amateurish shakedowns when compared with the sophistication of real profiteering through the humanitarian-sounding, high-brow, corrupt Clinton Foundation.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama Won’t Vote With America at the UN Under Obama, the United States won’t defend the United States. November 1, 2016 Daniel Greenfield

By on November 1st, 2016

A generation ago the Communist tyranny in Cuba demanded that the United Nations condemn America for the embargo. The brutal Castro regime’s rant accused the United States of threatening “nuclear annihilation,” “countless acts of sabotage and plans to assassinate Cuban leaders.”

On a cold day in October, the European left-wing activist serving as UN Ambassador announced to applause that her administration would no longer be voting to defend the US at the UN.

“UN Member States have voted overwhelmingly for a General Assembly resolution that condemns the U.S. embargo and calls for it to be ended. The United States has always voted against this resolution. Today the United States will abstain,” Samantha Power said.

“Thank you,” she added, acknowledging the applause.

Under Obama, the United States would no longer defend the United States. A generation ago the Communists had been in Cuba. Now they were in Washington D.C.

Instead of defending America, Obama’s chosen representative agreed that our Communist enemies had a point about our lack of human rights and our imperialist foreign policy.

“Let me be among the first to acknowledge – as our Cuban counterparts often point out – that the United States has work to do in fulfilling these rights for our own citizens. And we know that at times in our history, U.S. leaders and citizens used the pretext of promoting democracy and human rights in the region to justify actions that have left a deep legacy of mistrust,” she said.

If the Cuban representative had been in her place, he could not have done much better. Communist Cuban propaganda was now being parroted by Ambassador Power. If the Castro dictatorship wanted to save money, it could shut down its propaganda department and outsource the labor to Washington D.C.

The Cuban ambassador boasted that Cuban Communists had “rid ourselves of US imperialism” and proclaimed that, “We will never go back to capitalism.” He declared that the resolution was a powerful message to “the peoples of the world.” The message is indeed unmistakable.

Ben Rhodes, the close Obama adviser who sold the media on the Iran sellout, curtly tweeted his justification, “No reason to vote to defend a failed policy we oppose.”

Who is this “we”?

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POLITICS Comments turned off

How Trump Happened How the #NeverTrumpers sunk themselves. Bruce Thornton

By on November 1st, 2016

The chorus of NeverTrumpers is wailing ever louder as election day and Hillary’s supposed victory approach. After more than a year of complaining about Trump crashing their political soiree, the Republicans attacking Trump still don’t seem to get how their own behavior contributed to the perception that they are out-of-touch elites disdainful of the Republican masses.

A recent example comes from premier NeverTrumper Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal. In his column Stephens bids farewell to a Republican Party stupid enough to nominate Trump, contrasting it with his imagined Golden Age of Republican policy excellence that Trump and his followers have destroyed. One policy in particular, immigration, reveals the distance between the political and pundit elite and the voting masses that helped make Trump the nominee:

At a 1980 Republican primary debate in Houston, candidates George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were asked whether the children of illegal immigrants should be allowed to attend public schools for free. Mr. Bush said they should. “We’re creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law,” he lamented.

Reagan agreed. Instead of “putting up a fence,” he asked, “why don’t we . . . make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then, while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here.” For good measure, Reagan suggested we should “open the border both ways.”

Where, in the populist fervor to build a wall with Mexico and deport millions of human beings, is that Republican Party today?

Take Bush senior’s statement first. It repeats basically the same clichés that the bipartisan Gang of Eight recycled in 2013 during their push for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, another euphemism for amnesty. All those hard-working, family-values illegal immigrants are embryonic conservatives, we were told, who just need legal status and social recognition so they can “come out of the shadows,” as John McCain said, and start voting Republican. The political apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: son Jeb ended his presidential ambitions by calling illegal immigration an “act of love.”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Democratic Panic The renewed criminal investigation into Hillary’s misdeeds — and how it could affect the election. Matthew Vadum

By on November 1st, 2016

Democrats are in panic mode a week out from Election Day as they try to spin away the FBI’s newly announced discovery of a hoard of two-thirds of a million potentially sensitive emails apparently related to Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic tenure as America’s top diplomat.

Partisan hack James Carville is spewing wild conspiracy theories.

I think it is an outrage and I think the fact that the KGB is involved in this election is an outrage and I think the American people ought to take their democracy back regardless of what the press wants to do and the excuses they want to make for [FBI Director James] Comey. That’s what I think.

He added, “this is in effect an attempt to hijack an election. It ought to be called for what it is.”

Just this past July, Comey was praised by Democrats far and wide for his wisdom in opting not to pursue Clinton. There is evidence federal officials tried to hinder various investigations of Clinton and the endlessly corrupt Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which functions as a bribe processing center for would-be president Hillary Clinton.

But Democrats have suddenly flipped sides, denouncing Comey as an enemy of the republic now that he has opened an investigation into the newly discovered emails.

Carville, long known as the “Ragin’ Cajun,” is apoplectic because he thinks these emails could change the dynamics of the election.

The old Clinton hand may be right.

Investigators found 650,000 emails on a laptop computer they believe was used at home by disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D) and his wife, longtime senior Hillary aide Huma Abedin. The computer is reportedly the same device serial pervert Weiner used to send sexual messages to an underage girl.

“Underlying metadata suggests thousands of those messages could have been sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter,” reports the Wall Street Journal. Some of the information emailed may have been classified.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Phony War Against CO2 Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has helped raise global food production and reduce poverty. By Rodney W. Nichols and Harrison H. Schmitt

By on November 1st, 2016

National polls show that climate change is low on the list of voters’ priorities. For good reason: In the U.S., and for much of the world, the most dangerous environmental pollutants have been cleaned up. U.S. emissions of particulates, metals and varied gases—all of these: ozone, lead, carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen and sulfur—fell almost 70% between 1970 and 2014.

Further reductions will come from improved technologies such as catalytic removal of oxides of nitrogen and more-efficient sulfur scrubbers. This is a boon to human health.

But a myth persists that is both unscientific and immoral to perpetuate: that the beneficial gas carbon dioxide ranks among hazardous pollutants. It does not.

Unlike genuine pollutants, carbon dioxide (CO2) is an odorless, colorless gas. Every human being exhales about two pounds of CO2 a day, along with a similar amount of water vapor. CO2 is nontoxic to people and animals and is a vital nutrient to plants. It is also a greenhouse gas which helps maintain earth at a habitable temperature.

Fear of excessive warming from more CO2 in the atmosphere, including that released from human activity, has caused some people to advocate substantial and expensive reductions in CO2 emissions. But observations, such as those on our CO2 Coalition website, show that increased CO2 levels over the next century will cause modest and beneficial warming—perhaps as much as one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit)—and that this will be an even larger benefit to agriculture than it is now. The costs of emissions regulations, which will be paid by everyone, will be punishingly high and will provide no benefits to most people anywhere in the world.

In 2013 the level of U.S. farm output was about 2.7 times its 1948 level, and productivity was growing at an average annual rate of 1.52%. From 2001 to 2013, world-wide, global output of total crop and livestock commodities was expanding at an average rate of 2.52% a year.

This higher food security reduces poverty and increases well being and self-sufficiency everywhere, especially in the poorest parts of the developing countries. Along with better plant varieties, cropping practices and fertilizer, CO2 has contributed to this welcome increase in productivity. CONTINUE AT SITE

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