Spain: Leftist Politician Praises Islamic al-Andalus, Accuses Spanish Monarchy of ‘Genocide’ Suicidal self-hatred continues to sweep the West. Robert Spencer 3

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/spain-leftist-politician-praises-islamic-al-robert-spencer/

El HuffPost, which is what the Spanish language version of the hard-Left propaganda outfit the Huffington Post calls itself, on Wednesday tweeted a statement from Isabel Franco, a far-Left politician who is currently Vice President of the Region of Murcia and Regional Minister of Women, Equality, LGTBI, Families and Social Policy: “In Al-Ándalus three cultures coexisted. It was the Spanish monarchy that caused an enormous invasion, genocide and concealment.”

Well, of course. What else would you expect? What would have been surprising would have been Franco praising the Spanish monarchy and denigrating Islamic al-Andalus. But a Leftist politician of the twenty-first century praising an Islamic regime and denigrating Christian rulers is par for the course these days. Anything else would be “racist,” “bigoted,” “Islamophobic,” “xenophobic” and probably anti-trans or something as well.

If, however, Isabel Franco (pictured above) had been inclined to be honest, she would have plenty to apologize for. The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, the first and only comprehensive history of the 1,400-year jihad phenomenon worldwide in the English language, shows that Muslim Spain was anything but a model of multiculturalism and coexistence. In fact, it was miserable to live as a Christian there. Christians could never be sure that they would not be harassed. One contemporary account tells of priests being “pelted with rocks and dung” by Muslims while on the way to a cemetery. The dhimmis suffered severe economic hardship: Paul Alvarus, a ninth century Christian in Córdoba, complained about the “unbearable tax” that Muslims levied on Christians.

BLM’s Nobel Peace Prize Nomination Rewarding the destruction of a nation — in the name of “peace.” John Perazzo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/blms-nobel-peace-prize-nomination-john-perazzo/

These are exciting times for Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its comrades. First, they spent most of 2020 raking in countless millions of dollars in donations as compensation for turning dozens of American cities into war zones—an activity they describe as “racial justice” activism. Next, they helped get two their two most influential supporters on Earth, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, installed in the White House. And now, they have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

The nomination was put forth by the Norwegian parliamentarian Petter Eide, who lauds BLM for its noble “struggle against racism and racially motivated violence.” In light of the fact that Mr. Eide has represented the Socialist Left party in Parliament since 2017, it is no surprise that he should be impressed by the agendas and tactics of BLM, an organization founded by three self-identified “trained Marxist” revolutionaries: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. Under their leadership, BLM has perfected the longtime Marxist strategy of portraying the U.S. as a racist cesspool in desperate need of fundamental transformation. Presumably Mr. Eide believes that such a message, if repeated with sufficient frequency and passion, will promote “peace.”

Perhaps he also believes that yet another Marxist ideal advocated by BLM—the dissolution of “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—will likewise further the cause of “peace.”

While conceding that “people message me to say that BLM is a violent organization,” Mr. Eide dutifully explains that “if some elements of the movement may have been violent, that is not a reason to blame the whole movement.”

Biden Is Increasingly Detached From Reality On The Economy

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/08/biden-is-increasingly-detached-from-reality-on-the-economy/

A favorite Democratic cliché is “never let a crisis go to waste.” But with the “urgently needed” $1.9 trillion relief bill, Democrats are inventing the crisis. While they keep depicting the economy as being in a free fall, it is, by historic standards, doing well.

Some Democrats are already coming to realize that piling another $1.9 trillion in deficit spending on top of the more than $3 trillion already targeting COVID relief is an enormous mistake. Here’s what Politico reported last week after liberal economist Larry Summers cautioned that the Biden plan was too big.

Summers, the former Treasury secretary for Bill Clinton and top economic adviser to Barack Obama, puts down on paper what many liberal wonks have been whispering about for weeks: that President Joe Biden’s stimulus bill may be too big, that its overall cost could sacrifice other progressive priorities and that it could harm the economy next year, when Democrats will be defending narrow congressional majorities in the midterms.

Summers warns of “inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability.”

Give Summers and those anonymous “liberal wonks” credit, at least, for staying in the neighborhood of reality, something that seems to have escaped “No Malarky” Biden.

George Pratt Shultz As Secretary of State, he helped Reagan end the Cold War by winning it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/george-pratt-shultz-11612725575?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, called his memoir “Present at the Creation,” an account of rebuilding the postwar world and the realities of a Cold War with the Soviet Union. Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who died Saturday at age 100, titled his memoir “Turmoil and Triumph,” an apt description of the historic role Shultz played in ending the Cold War some 40 years later.

Shultz served as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State for almost the length of Reagan’s Presidency, from 1982 until 1989. The “turmoil” of his memoir’s title described the world as he took control of foreign policy for Reagan.

The Soviet Union, possessing a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, was led by Yuri Andropov, a determined communist opponent of the West. Hard to believe now, but Europe then was still divided by what Winston Churchill called an “iron curtain,” which separated the free democratic nations of Western Europe from the closed, Soviet-dominated countries to the east. Millions were imprisoned inside these countries, unable to emigrate. Those who tried to flee could be imprisoned or shot.

Mediocrity Is Now Mandatory From stimulus to school admissions, leaders act as if ease is the only worthy goal. By Andy Kessler

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mediocrity-is-now-mandatory-11612724198?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Has an era of American mediocrity begun? In January the College Board announced it would eliminate the essay portion of the SAT, as well as all of the separate SAT subject tests. Their stated purpose was “reducing and simplifying demands on students.” Such a burden.

One high school near me just dropped freshman advanced-standing (honors) English “to combat the effects of academic ‘tracking” because it “ultimately separates students of different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds.” It turns out that middle schools from lower-income areas aren’t adequately preparing their students for high school. So rather than fix that problem, they dumbed down high school.

Then again, when the University of California system did away with racial preferences in 1996, it moved to holistic admissions. What does holistic mean? Anything you want. The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities defines it as “assessing an applicant’s unique experiences alongside traditional measures of academic readiness.” Grades are only a suggestion—and SAT scores are biased, supposedly. And here you thought smart students got into good colleges. Yes, mediocrity has crept into our self-proclaimed elite colleges. Job recruiters understand this.

Virtually all universities and now many companies have D&I departments, for diversity and inclusion. Sounds worthy. But as far as I can tell, the No. 1 job of a D&I department is to hire more people into the D&I department. No one ever mentions excellence.

Jonathan Turley: Impeaching Trump – House threatens to trash this core principle to ensure conviction The statement of House manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., last week was breathtaking

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/impeaching-trump-house-threatens-core-principle-jonathan-turley

Over the last four years, we have seen an alarming trend of law professors and legal experts discarding constitutional and due process commitments to support theories for the prosecution or impeachment of Donald Trump or his family. 

Legal experts who long defended criminal defense rights have suddenly become advocates of the most sweeping interpretations of criminal or constitutional provisions while discarding basic due process  and fairness concerns. Even theories that have been clearly rejected by the Supreme Court have been claimed to be valid in columns. No principle seems inviolate when it stands in the way of a Trump prosecution.

Yet, the statement of House manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., last week was breathtaking. A former law professor, Raskin declared that the decision of Trump not to testify in the Senate could be cited or used by House managers as an inference of his guilt – a statement that contradicts not just our constitutional principles but centuries of legal writing.

Yet, it appears a signature of this team of House managers. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., insisted in the last impeachment that the failure of then-President Trump to turn over documents by citing privilege or other defenses should be cited as evidence of guilt on any underlying claims.

The Reichstag Fire of the Democrats A pretext for political terror. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/reichstag-fire-democrats-daniel-greenfield/

There are thousands of soldiers outside Congress and political terror inside its halls. That political terror isn’t coming from a QAnon Shaman who only eats organic food, but from the Democrats who are using a manufactured state of emergency to purge the opposition.

Democrats deployed 26,000 troops to Washington D.C. at a cost of $500 million. Thousands of soldiers, authorized to use deadly force as they were forbidden to do either at the border or during the Black Lives Matter assault on the White House, will stay to fight an imaginary threat.

While walls, razor wire, and military encampments rise outside the halls of government, inside them the Democrats have unleashed a true coup. Protesters have “stormed” Congress before, from both the Left and the Right, which cannot be called overthrowing the government. But Democrats began their own overthrow by launching an unconstitutional post-office impeachment of President Trump for speaking at a peaceful protest and a push to remove Senate members who objected to the stolen election by abusing the 14th Amendment.

The fake emergency has been extended to March. The FBI continues falsely claiming that there is some sort of threat that requires 7,500 soldiers to conduct a military occupation of the nation’s capital. The FBI’s claims that this threat would occur during “First Amendment-protected protests” has a massive credibility problem because there have been no protests in D.C.

Even though these protests have yet to emerge for over a month, the occupation goes on.

‘The Queen’s Gambit’: The Accelerated Polgár Variation Joe Dolce

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/01/the-queens-gambit-the-accelerated-polgar-variation/

EXCERPTS

When Walter Tevis’s novel The Queen’s Gambit came out in 1983, it slipped past the mainstream media, but everyone I knew in the Melbourne chess world was familiar with it. Little did anyone at the time suspect that Tevis’s fantasy about a female chess prodigy would be incarnated in the true story of the three Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters, who emerged in the mid-1980s, the eldest, Susan, becoming in 1986 the first woman to qualify for the World Championship.

The closest the world of chess has come to the tale in The Queen’s Gambit is in the true story of the Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters, Susan, Sofia and Judit, who were raised from birth as chess prodigies by their father, Laszlo Polgár. Polgár’s father survived Auschwitz but his father’s first wife and five children were murdered there. Laszlo Polgár believed that geniuses were made, not born, and that if children were taught a single intellectual activity from early childhood, they would master it. He used his three daughters, and chess, as his grand experiment in child-rearing psychology.

Polgár and his wife Klára were both teachers. They home-schooled the girls, developing a regime of early morning sports, including high-velocity ping-pong, for the girls’ physical stamina, before six to eight hours a day of chess training, lasting until well after dark.

Polgár created a card catalogue system, assembled from chess magazine clippings, with over 200,000 games cut and pasted onto index cards, the “cartotech”, for the girls to use during their study. This was the biggest chess archive outside the USSR.

‘Time’ Returns to the Scene of the Crime Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2021/02/like-a-criminal-time-returns-to-the-scene-of-the-crime/

Many scammers have been done in because they couldn’t resist boasting. In regard  to Joe Biden’s dubious but now officially endorsed ‘victory’ in November’s US presidential election, this time the boasting takes the form of a giant, 7000-words piece in Time magazine, an impeccably progressive and anti-Trump journal.

Its scoop is headed, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, with the chief byline belonging to reporter Molly Ball, who was backed by a team of junior scribblers. Over months they sleuthed out the names and modus operandi of powerful cabals that conspired to ensure that Trump would not, could not, win. From Time’s point of view, the conspirators “saved democracy” from Trump. The participants are heroes, in the fading news magazine’s view, with Ms Ball laying out chapter and verse how the assault on a democratic election was planned, mounted and succeeded.

“They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it,” Time claims, playing semantic games while rewarding the conspirators with attention and, albeit unintentionally, exposing their methods and alliances.

An ominous conclusion — passed off by Time as a good thing —  is that since these cabals succeeded while Trump was in power, their own power will be enormously magnified under the aegis of the Biden presidency. One can be certain America’s “fortified” future elections will be welcomed with official endorsement and all the resources, overt and covert, that the Democrat ruling establishment and “the swamp”can muster.

Ironies abound. Trumpers have been relentlessly mocked for conspiratorial thinking. But Time doesn’t just admit the existence of such a conspiracy, it gloatingly reveals how its architects and participants made sure he could not carry the day on November 3. All this was perfectly justified, according to Time, because Trump was an incipient dictator preparing to launch “an assault on democracy”. As it sings hosannas with the Left choir, the magazine feels no need to provide  evidence for that assertion.

Black Lives Matter, Antifa March Through DC, Chant ‘Burn It Down’ By Jack Phillips

https://www.theepochtimes.com/black-lives-matter-antifa-march-through-dc-chant-burn-it-down_3688149.html

Black Lives Matter protesters and Antifa agitators marched through Washington D.C. on Saturday and threatened people as they ate dinner, according to video footage and reports.

“Burn it down” is what the demonstrators said. “We are here tonight because black lives matter,” members of the far-left group also said. “Despite black lives mattering, black people are still dying at the hands of the police paid for by our tax dollars.”

Other video footage uploaded by independent journalists on the scene showed Antifa types fighting with police officers, who were trying to keep them away from restaurants. Some, who were clad in all black, could be seen holding the red-and-black Antifa flag.