EDUCATION Comments turned off

“Education – The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time” Sydney Williams

Posted By on June 25th, 2020

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

We are a polyglot nation, a people of all races, ethnicities and religions. We come from the four corners of the globe. But we are who we are. None of us chose to be born where we were. We did not choose the color of our skin. We did not choose our sex, height, or the color of our hair and eyes. We did not choose our physical prowess or our intellectual aptitude. Those are factors we are born with and cannot change; though we can, and we should, enhance them to our advantage. But we can also improve our lives through education. We can read, train and practice. And we can be taught that tolerance and civility are critical to survival as a society, community and nation.

Education has been called the civil rights issue of our time by George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. There are, however, disagreements as to how it is achieved. Democrats believe in the power of money, that more should be spent in poor districts and on inner city schools. Republicans favor choice. Money is important, but dollars expended do not always guaranty a positive result. New York City spends more than twice what the average school district in the United States spends per pupil ($25,199 versus $12,201 in 2017). Yet less than half of New York City students in grades three through eight passed State exams, according to the New York Times. Democrats are influenced by their dependence on the two major teachers’ unions, the National Educational Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Ninety-five percent of the $30 million they spent on elections in 2018 went to Democrats.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

White Self-Hatred and the Cancel Culture Mervyn Bendle

Posted By on June 25th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/white-self-hatred-and-the-cancel-culture/

” Where did it come from, this eruption of rioting and demands that statues and history be torn down? Well, much as the Black Lives Matter crowd might seem of recent origin, it is the Sixties where it all began.”

Violent, uncontrolled demonstrations, vicious attacks on the police, bitter condemnations of ‘white privilege’, the comprehensive ‘cancellation’ and fabrication of history, and the destruction and vandalization of historical monuments under the umbrella of the Black Lives Matter campaign have become central features of the current radical assaults on Western societies.

The massive involvement of semi-hysterical young white people is one of the most striking features of this ‘cultural revolution’. Anxious to be associated with black protesters in the vanguard of destruction and chaos, they run back and forth in their designer black ‘Ninja’ outfits, elegantly masked, shrieking abuse and baiting police, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, attacking bystanders, inanely kicking and punching toppled statues as they push them into drains, and smashing shopfront windows to loot items their parents would buy them without a second thought. And then, on social media they attack viciously anyone who dares to disagree with them or question how their over-hyped involvement helps the campaign for racial justice.

In seeking to understand this frenzied phenomenon of ostentatious self-abnegation it is necessary to discuss its ideological and activist origins in the far-left terrorist groups of the Sixties. This venture into history might serve to forewarn where this might all be heading.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

BLACK SLAVES MATTER! Harry Cummins *****

Posted By on June 25th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/black-slaves-matter/

“There is no money nor kudos in trying to end the Muslim slave trade, but the likes of Black Lives Matter most definitely recognise the rewards to be tapped in the bottomless reservoir of Western guilt. Meanwhile, black slaves are chained, abused and castrated as the same activists avert their gaze”

The criteria that broadcasters and newspapers used to sort what was newsworthy from what was not always eluded me. It seemed that they regularly ignored or failed properly to foreground what was self-evidently startling or essential. They also appeared to highlight reports that were less shocking but also less important examples of the items they hid or downplayed. Long after I left the British Council, I would amuse myself by checking the internet or the inside of the papers I bought for the sort of “suppressed” stories that might more aptly have graced the front page.

On January 17, 2015, I stumbled on an article hidden deep in the Weekend edition of Le Monde so extraordinary that I cut it out. It was entitled, “En Mauritanie, prison ferme pour trois militants anti-esclavagisme” [“In Mauritania, imprisonment for three anti-slavery activists”].

Revealing that ‘Mauritanian justice’ had just sentenced the activists to two years in jail for making ‘racist propaganda’, Charlotte Bozonnet, the author of the piece, said that the punishment was:

A conviction that highlights the taboo subject of slavery, a practice officially outlawed since 1981, but still extremely widespread in Mauritanian society. The three accused are Biram Ould Abeid, Director of the Initiative for the Resurrection of the Abolitionist Movement, an anti-slavery NGO, Brahim Ould Bilal Ramdane, one of his deputies, and Djilby Sow, president of an association for civic and cultural rights.

Arraigned before a tribunal in Rosso in the south of the country, they had been arrested in November 2014 … while they were leading a ground campaign to denounce the practice of slavery  … “Biram” is a big name in the struggle against slavery in Mauritania, himself from a family of Haratines — the caste of slaves and the descendants of slaves’.

MEDIA Comments turned off

In Racist Screed, NYT’s 1619 Project Founder Calls ‘White Race’ ‘Barbaric Devils,’ ‘Bloodsuckers,’ Columbus ‘No Different Than Hitler’ By Jordan Davidson

Posted By on June 25th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1619-project-founder-calls-white-race-barbaric-devils-bloodsuckers-no-different-than-hitler/

In an indication of what was to come, the founder of the New York Times’ 1619 Project penned a lengthy racist screed attacking all white people in 1995.

Nicole Hannah-Jones, the lead essayist on New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, wrote a letter to the editor in Notre Dame’s The Observer stating that “the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.”

Hannah-Jones claimed that the actions of European settlers and explorers such as Christopher Columbus were “acts of devils” and likens them to Hitler.

“[The whites] lasting monument was the destruction and enslavement of two races of people,” Hannah-Jones wrote.

Hannah-Jones claims Africans arrived in North America long before Europeans, but that unlike Europeans, Africans befriended and traded with the indigenous people. She claims pyramids in Mexico are a symbol of said friendship.

She then moves to the present and argues that white people today still take advantage of other people.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

It’s Time to Cancel the Statue-Toppling Morons By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on June 25th, 2020

The discussion about the removal of Confederate statues was a valid one, but that didn’t last long before the mob started going after all statues like predators after wounded prey.

Matt wrote a post yesterday detailing just how idiotic the anti-statue crowd has become:

There’s a memorial statue Lincoln Park in Washington D.C. that depicts President Abraham Lincoln holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing a slave. The Emancipation Memorial, also called Freedman’s Memorial, apparently offends Black Lives Matter protestors, who, on Tuesday, vowed to topple it down.

That’s right, Lincoln is getting canceled for freeing the slaves by the people who want racial healing or something.

Many have noted that the stupidity displayed by these young people shows how badly our public schools have failed them. In a column I wrote last week I made the opposite point: this is the triumph of our public education system because whitewashing American history to turn the younger generations into an easily controlled mob has been the point of it all for decades.

During our weekly VIP Gold live chat on Wednesday my colleagues Stephen Green and Bryan Preston both agreed that the statue nonsense is an expression of impotent rage on the part of the woke mob. Ever the curmudgeon, I just look at it as wanton destruction of public property and think all involved should get to cool off for a night or two in their local city or county jail.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Flynn Highlights New Strzok Notes in Urging Dismissal of Case By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on June 25th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/flynn-highlights-new-strzok-notes-in-urging-dismissal-of-case/

Strzok’s notes are significant in what they confirm, but they probably do not reveal anything new.

Well, there is lots going on in Flynn World.

The president’s former national-security advisor, Michael Flynn, is obviously elated that, on Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit granted his petition for a writ of mandamus — i.e., it instructed District Judge Emmet Sullivan to grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the case against him. I have a column about the ruling up on the homepage.

As reported by NR’s Zachary Evans, moreover, Flynn defense lawyer Sidney Powell has filed an intriguing supplement the defense’s concurrence in the Justice Department’s dismissal motion. The supplement, also filed on Wednesday, includes notes said to have been handwritten by Peter Strzok, then a top FBI counterintelligence agent (and, of course, later fired for sundry misconduct).

It is being widely reported that the notes concern a now infamous White House meeting about Flynn that took place on January 5, 2017. (I began writing about that meeting as soon as we learned about it in early 2018, and it is central to my book about the Trump–Russia investigation, Ball of Collusion). The meeting included the top political and law-enforcement leadership of the Obama administration — President Obama, Vice President Biden, national-security advisor Susan Rice, deputy attorney general Sally Yates, and FBI director James Comey — notwithstanding the insistence of Obama apologists that the administration did not permit law enforcement to be influenced by politics. (I would counter that mixing the two was the administration’s M-O).

I suspect the Strzok notes are about the January 5 meeting, too. There is, however, confusion on this point.

The short supplement Ms. Powell filed states that Strzok’s notes are “believed to be of January 4, 2017” (emphasis added). Now, Powell received these notes from the Justice Department as part of its continuing review of the Flynn case (which was prosecuted by special counsel Robert Mueller’s staff). Obviously, she is privy to more information about the case than we are, and we do not know what, if anything, DOJ told her about the provenance of the notes. That said, I am skeptical about the January 4 dating.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, POLITICS Comments turned off

2020 Election Will Be a Contest of the Angry By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 25th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/2020-election-contest-of-the-angry/

It is no longer really about Biden and Trump.

The old 2020 election was supposed to be about many familiar issues. It is not anymore.

Up until now, the candidates themselves would supposedly be the story in November. The Left had cited Trump’s tweets and erratic firings as windows into his dark soul.

The Right had replied that an addled and befuddled Joe Biden was not really a candidate at all.

Instead, he was a mere facsimile who would have to be carried to the Election Day on the shoulders of the Democratic Party, only shortly to fade away. Then a radical vice president soon could implement a hard-left agenda by succession what she could not through election.

Issues themselves are no longer likely to decide the election either. Not long ago progressives argued that the miracle Trump economy was in shambles, done in by plague, quarantine, and riot.

They thundered that it was what you would expect from Trump’s innate chaos — a mess that would have to be invented if it had not existed.

The Right had countered that deregulation, energy development, tax reform, and reindustrialization that made America Great would make American Great Again.

For all of 2019 and 2020, Democrats had claimed that a calm abroad would return with a Biden win. They talked of reestablishing the influence of post-war American-led diplomacy, soft power, traditional alliances, transnational organizations, and the United Nations.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Minnesota State Rep: Antifa and Muslim Groups Plan to ‘Police Minneapolis Under Muslim Rule’ Robert Spencer

Posted By on June 25th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/minnesota-state-rep-antifa-and-muslim-groups-plan-robert-spencer/#.XvOMjgPfd0A.email

‘It would have sounded farfetched just weeks ago. It doesn’t anymore. C.B.

As the city of Minneapolis moves to dismantle its police force, Minnesota state Rep. Steve Green on Tuesday stated the obvious that virtually everyone else has been tiptoeing around and pretending isn’t there: “What you’re looking at, in my humble opinion, is communism moving into Minneapolis and St. Paul.” And not just Communism, but the Leftist/Islamic alliance. Green asserted that Antifa and Muslim organizations plan to “police Minneapolis under Muslim rule.” Those who scoff at such a notion simply aren’t paying attention to recent developments.

The Minneapolis City Council voted two weeks ago to abolish the city’s police force. Its plans beyond that have so far been sketchy, but something is going to have to be put in place as an alternative to the police. The New York Times noted that “many have called for relying more on self-policing by the community, in the way attendees often do at events like music festivals, with the police stepping in only when a true emergency arises. Some cited as an example how, in the days after the killing of Mr. Floyd, teams made up of dozens of members of the American Indian Movement patrolled streets and directed traffic in the Little Earth housing community in Minneapolis.”

If members of the local community end up policing Minneapolis, what might that look like? Back in 2016, a series of Minneapolis Muslims in man-on-the-street interviews stated matter-of-factly that they preferred Islamic law over American law. We have seen Sharia patrols in Germany, Britain, and even New York City, where the Muslim Community Patrol (MCP) is decked out in uniforms that strong resemble New York Police Department uniforms, and drives cars carefully designed to look like NYPD cars, to enforce “fundamentals of the Sharia.”

Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj explained what that meant: “The mosques need protection and the MCP cars can help stop people who were not following the rules and regulations of the sharia, doing what they’re not supposed to be doing, but still doing it.” According to a Muslim involved with the MCP, this would involve stopping “Muslim women being out after dark, Muslim men hanging out in the corners doing dope, Muslims drinking liquor,” and enforcing, “basically, the fundamentals of the Sharia.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: Is It Really about ‘Annexation’? by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on June 25th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16147/palestinians-annexation

It is dead wrong to assume that if Israel abandons its plan, most Muslims would give up their desire to destroy Israel and replace it with an extremist Iran-style Islamic state.

[Islamic officials] are now calling on Palestinians to launch terror attacks against Israel, not because of the “annexation” plan, but in order to drive the Jews out of the “Palestinian Arab Islamic lands.”

Those who are pressuring Israel not to proceed with the “annexation” plan need to hear what Islamic leaders are saying, day and night: that the conflict is not about Jewish settlements or the Jordan Valley, but the “big settlement” called Israel.

As far as Palestinian Islamic religious clerics are concerned, Israel’s intention to extend its sovereignty to parts of the West Bank, particularly Jewish settlements and the strategic Jordan Valley, means very little: to them Jews “have no right to Palestinian, Arab and Islamic land.”

The position of the Islamic figures contradicts the Palestinian Authority’s claim that the annexation plan would “destroy the two-state solution and any chance of a peace process with Israel.”

The picture Palestinian Authority officials are painting is that the Israeli annexation of any part of the West Bank is the one and only obstacle to regional peace, security and stability. According to these officials, the Israeli plan would deprive the Palestinians of their right to establish an independent and sovereign state on the pre-1967 armistice lines.

A large group of Palestinian Islamic scholars and clerics, however, evidently disagree with the Palestinian Authority’s claim.

On June 21, the Association of Palestine Scholars held a meeting in the Gaza Strip to discuss the Israeli plan. The meeting was attended by several Islamic religious judges representing the Supreme Council of Sharia Judiciary, senior officials of the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Waqf and Religious Affairs, academics from several Islamic colleges and universities, as well as jurists who issue rulings on Islamic law (sharia).

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How to Deal with China?: “Made in America” by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on June 25th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16153/how-to-deal-with-china

China’s threats to punish Australia seem to be part of an increasingly bullying, aggressive approach by Chinese officials, not only toward Australia, but also toward India, and at least four other countries in the region: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Japan, as well as islands in the Pacific.

The only real solution to China’s duplicity and aggression would be for Western nations — all 186 nations that were harmed by China’s lies during the Covid-19 pandemic — to cut all ties with China, to start a firm policy of “Made in America” or “Made Anywhere But China” to show a willing independence from a country that openly aspires to dominate the world.

China — perhaps hoping that everyone is sufficiently distracted by the virus the Chinese Communist Party unleashed on it, as well as by the “free gifts” from China that, in their trade-off for freedom, promise to be fatal — is clearly on the march. The world might remember that it would have been so much easier to stop Hitler before he crossed the Rhine.

China’s Communist Party leadership was not pleased to hear a call from Australia for a global inquiry into the origin of the Covid-19 virus and China’s possible role in it.

Australia further requested that the investigation be conducted outside the purview of the World Health Organization (WHO), which had had been spreading lies and disinformation about the transmissibility of the virus. China seems to have decided that Australia’s insistence on an independent study was a violation of the spirit of their bilateral relationship. Indeed, for the past three decades, the Australian economy has been buoyed by expanding commercial ties with China. This relationship has now soured, and China has been threatening Australia with economic warfare unless it reconsiders its inquisitive foreign policy.

Making good on its threat, China slapped an 80% tariff on Australian barley and has threatened to boycott Australian wine and beef. Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne has rejected any such attempts at economic coercion.