POLITICS Comments turned off

Party Leaders on Edge After Democrats’ Ragged 2020 Launch . By Julie Pace

Posted By on February 10th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/02/10/party_leaders_on_edge_after_democrats_ragged_2020_launch_142356.html

For Democrats, this was supposed be a moment to begin easing three years of built-up of anxieties. Instead, the launch of the 2020 presidential primary has left the party deeply unsettled and President Donald Trump gleeful about the chaos.

Party leaders are on edge over embarrassing technical issues that marred this past week’s Iowa caucuses, as well as lower than expected turnout in the leadoff state. Front-runners Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg face questions about their long-term political viability, while some supporters of the two leading women left in the race — Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — are raising alarms about what they view as persistent sexism.

“It’s a hard start,” said Laura Keeler, a 35-year-old from Concord, New Hampshire.

Indeed, it’s far from the 2020 launchpad most Democrats envisioned as they eagerly anticipated their opportunity to take on Trump. The turbulent start to this election year has also crystallized the challenges confronting Democrats in trying to mount a formidable challenge to an incumbent backed by an energized and united Republican Party and fortified by a soaring economy.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: AN AFTERNOON AT THE BALLET-ARS VINCIT OMNIA

Posted By on February 10th, 2020

Yesterday, after a full week of imposed house/bed rest due to a vicious virus, I finally left my home. I had purchased tickets to a City Center performance of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake where the swans and the doomed lovers are all performed by male dancers. When it premiered in 1995 antedating political correctness it caused quite a stir. I was curious to see its latest revival. I had an aisle seat and as soon as I was comfortably ensconced, I calculated the distance to the quickest exit.

When I saw the magnificent set and the music began I eased into the performance and actually enjoyed it and remained until the last note.

I love ballet and often the combination of music and great dancing transcends admittedly silly plots and gives way to enchantment.

That never happened at this performance although most of the dancing was superb and a raucous bar scene featured excellent ballerinas as well in vivacious and demanding roles. This is a dark and strange version of a classic ballet.

 I was surprised at my reaction and enjoyment -evidence of “ars vincit omnia”- art conquers all. Sometimes. Rsk

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Once and Future Scandal Victor Davis Hanson *****

Posted By on February 10th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/09/the-once-and-future-scandal/

Soon the worm may turn. The real scandal is back on the horizon, and at last, we may learn that no one is above the law—most certainly not a group of smug and mediocre apparatchiks who assumed they had the moral right to destroy a presidential candidate and later an elected president.

Now that the four-and-a-half-month-long Ukraine impeachment bookend to the 22-month Mueller charade is over, it clearly accomplished nothing other than substantially raising the polls of both Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The public was reminded that Representative Gerald Nadler (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are every bit as childish, peevish, and absurd as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

So, we are now back to the existential issue of the entire Trump phenomenon: to what degree did the Hillary Clinton campaign collude with high-ranking Obama officials, and the top echelons of the FBI, CIA, and the national intelligence apparatus, to surveil, defame, and hope to derail Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign by unlawful means?

Who in the federal government then continued Clinton’s efforts after the 2016 election to disrupt and indeed attempt to destroy the Trump transition and presidency?

Eventually, someone will sort out whether that post-election effort on the part of federal officials to abort the Trump presidency, abetted by the media and #TheResistance, was a simple follow-up to the Clinton-DNC-Perkins Coe-Fusion GPS collusion against candidate Trump—or a sick preemptive attempt of the administrative state to smear Trump as a “Russian asset” because of their worries about the exposure of their own prior criminality and Trump’s iconoclastic agenda.

But for now, the following statements are irrefutable.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

What Americans Can Learn from F. W. de Klerk’s Great Betrayal of South Africa Ilana Mercer

Posted By on February 10th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/09/what-americans-can-learn-from-f-w-de-klerks-great-betrayal-of-south-africa/

Universal suffrage is not to be conflated with freedom. As Iraqis learned after their “liberation,” ink-stained fingers don’t inoculate against bloodstains—or rivers of blood.

In what should serve as a lesson for Americans today, recall that 30 years ago on February 2, 1990, F. W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, turned the screws on his constituents, betraying the confidence we had placed in him.

I say “we,” because, prior to becoming president in 1989, De Klerk was my representative, in the greater Vereeniging region of Southern Transvaal, where I lived. (Our family subsequently moved to Cape Town.)

A constellation of circumstances had aligned to catapult De Klerk to a position of great power. A severe stroke forced the “The Crocodile,” President P. W. Botha, from power in 1989. Nothing in the background of his successor, De Klerk, indicated the revolutionary policies he would pursue.

In response to a 1992 referendum asking white voters if they favored De Klerk’s proposed reforms, we returned a resounding “yes.” Sixty-eight percent of respondents said “yes” to the proposed reforms of a man who sold his constituents out for a chance to frolic on the world stage with Nelson Mandela.

For it was in surrendering South Africa to the African National Congress that De Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela.

Why was De Klerk trusted to negotiate on behalf of a vulnerable racial minority? For good reason: he had made his views abundantly clear to constituents. “Negotiations would only be about power-sharing,” he promised. At the time, referendum respondents generally trusted De Klerk, who had specifically condemned crude majority rule. Such elections, in Africa, traditionally have amounted to “one man, one vote, one time.” Typically, such elections across Africa have followed a familiar pattern: Radical black nationalist movements take power everywhere, then elections cease. Or, if they take place, they’re rigged.

Among much else, De Klerk’s loyal constituents agreed to his scrapping of the ban on the Communist-sympathizing ANC. Freeing Nelson Mandela from incarceration was also viewed as long overdue as was acceding to Namibia’s independence, and junking nuclear weapons. Botha, before de Klerk, had by and large already dismantled the most egregious aspects of apartheid.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Victor Orbán’s Lesson in Prudence for Western Intellectuals Titus Techera

Posted By on February 10th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/09/victor-orbans-lesson-in-prudence-for-western-intellectuals/

There is more to be said about this remarkably discrete teaching, but this is the necessary introduction. Intellectuals need to learn from the politicians.

To judge by what scares liberals internationally, the unassuming Israeli academic Yoram Hazony is the most dangerous intellectual active today. The National Conservatism Conference he organized in Rome last week has already been demonized in The Guardian and elsewhere. The one British member of Parliament in attendance, Daniel Kaczynski, was forced by the Tories to apologize publicly for being in the same room as the most successful politician on the continent, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

For his part, Orbán was a model of moderation and spoke in his typical direct style, cutting through the false pieties and not mincing words about unflattering realities, not even those concerning him or his country. He was interviewed by Hudson Institute scholar Christopher DeMuth and the entire conference hung on his every word, though it is unclear if his subtlety was well understood.

Orbán stated plainly that he’s been in politics for decades, about half in opposition and half in power, and he understands both sides. Although he was welcomed as a leader, he chose to speak as a follower. He said Hungary is a small country in need of allies and in need of the European Union, despite the enmity of the national conservatives for the EU. He also said small countries cannot afford not to have smart leaders, in the only moment he came close to bragging.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinians: After Inciting Violence, Abbas Comes to New York To Fight a Peace Plan by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on February 10th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15560/palestinians-abbas-inciting-violence

“Other stateless people can only dream of being offered independence and $50bn by the US president…. If only the Yazidis or Baluchis or Kurds or Rohingya Muslims were so lucky.” – Tom Gross, January 29, 2020.

The plan… offers the Palestinians most of the land captured by Israel in 1967 that more than doubles their territory; a government with realized human rights and institutions of democracy, such as a free press, and $50 billion — all as part of an extraordinary opportunity to build a flourishing Palestinian State.

Incredibly, Palestinian leaders seem to believe that no one understands that it is their own incitement that is instigating violence, not a peace plan yet to be implemented.

Abbas has no peace plan. That is probably why he is now hoping that the violence he incited will force Israel and the US to surrender even greater concessions to the Palestinians.

It now remains to be seen whether the Security Council and the international community will demand an end to continued Palestinian terrorism and rejection. Failure to do so will only allow Abbas and Hamas to proceed with their long-standing scheme of inciting their people to pursue terrorism every time they are offered a plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is on his way to the United Nations Security Council to speak against US President Donald Trump’s plan for Middle East peace — “Peace to Prosperity” — after having incited his people, yet again, against Israel and the US.

Abbas’s non-stop incitement has resulted so far in the deaths of three young Palestinian men in the West Bank — Nidal Ahmed Nafleh, 19, Yazan Munther Abu Tabeekh, 19, and Mohammed Salman Haddad, 17 — who were killed by the Israel Defense Forces while attacking soldiers with firebombs.

Why did the three men take to the streets to attack IDF soldiers? Because Abbas called on his people to step up “popular resistance activities” to protest the ostensible Trump “conspiracy.”

Such incitement is seen by Palestinians in the West Bank as a green light to attack Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers with rocks, knives, car-rammings, explosive devices and firebombs.

Nafleh, Abu Tabeekh and Haddad most likely never even read the 180-page peace plan against which they were they were protesting. They undoubtedly went out to attack IDF soldiers because they were informed by their leaders, including Abbas, that Trump’s plan is an “American-Zionist plot to liquidate the Palestinian cause.” The plan, on the contrary, offers the Palestinians most of the land captured by Israel in 1967 that more than doubles their territory; a government with realized human rights and institutions of democracy, such as a free press, and $50 billion — all as part of an extraordinary opportunity to build a flourishing Palestinian State.

As the journalist, Tom Gross, observed:

“Other stateless people can only dream of being offered independence and $50bn by the US president…. If only the Yazidis or Baluchis or Kurds or Rohingya Muslims were so lucky.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

West Point Tackles ‘Toxic Masculinity’ “I’m being taught how not to be a man.” Mark Tapson

Posted By on February 10th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/west-point-tackles-toxic-masculinity-mark-tapson/

If you are a good, committed cultural Marxist and your mission is to help dismantle the cultural, economic, and power structures in the capitalist West from within, how do you undertake such a grand task? How do you subvert an entire civilization? You undermine its foundations, and the most basic building block of all is the nuclear family. To deconstruct the family successfully, you must subvert masculinity, because masculinity is the warrior spirit of that nuclear family. To emasculate a civilization, you indoctrinate its youth to believe that the natural traits typically associated with masculinity – such as aggression, competitiveness, and emotional self-control – are poisonous to society and even to boys and men themselves. You convince men – especially society’s warriors – to reject their very nature altogether.

This January, cadets at West Point, the United States Military Academy, were required to attend educational events for “Honorable Living Day,” the academy’s third such day hosted during the short tenure of Superintendent Lt. Gen. Darryl A. Williams. The first was held last February and focused on eliminating sexual assault and harassment at the academy, which has been co-ed since 1976. The second, held last semester, called upon cadets, staff and faculty to improve the culture in order to combat sexual assault further.

At this most recent Honorable Living Day, the goal was to “expand the discussion beyond sexual assault and talk about how all aspects of the community can come together and promote an atmosphere of honorable living to include diversity, inclusion and acceptance of people from differing backgrounds, races and genders.” Lt. Gen. Williams described the curriculum as being “connected” to improving combat readiness.

Eradicating any sexual assaults or harassment at West Point is a worthy goal. They shouldn’t be tolerated in any work or study environment. Encouraging cadets to live with personal integrity and to treat others according to the content of their character and not the color of their skin are also vital aims. But if reports from several male West Point cadets are true, there appears to be more going on in this past Honorable Living Day than meets the eye. Breitbart News reported that it received comments from some cadets, on condition of anonymity, complaining that the program went beyond merely discouraging sexual harassment. As one cadet put it: “I’m being taught how not to be a man.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Cyrus Video: Trump Takes Out Terrorists And guess what those terrorists had in common?

Posted By on February 10th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/cyrus-video-trump-takes-out-terrorists-frontpagemagcom/

Subscribe to the Glazov Gang‘s YouTube Channel and follow us on Twitter: @JamieGlazov.

This new Glazov Gang episode features Anni Cyrus, the Founder of Live Up To Freedom and producer of The Glazov Gang.

Anni discusses Trump Takes Out Terrorists, and unveils what all those terrorists had in common.

Don’t miss it!

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Victims of Anti-Christian Persecution And a harrowing glimpse at their victimizers. Jack Kerwick

Posted By on February 10th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/victims-anti-christian-persecution-jack-kerwick/

Now that the year is behind us, Open Doors provides a recap of some of the most telling stories of global anti-Christian persecution from 2019.

It’s important to look at specific accounts of this endemic phenomenon, lest appeals to statistics, which despite being quite revealing themselves, threaten to obscure the ugliness of the suffering daily endured by Christians the planet over.

Anecdotal proof of this oppression also permits a study in contrasts between the religious bigotry to which Christians are subjected and that claimed on behalf of the members of other religious groups.

A third virtue to be had from familiarizing ourselves with victimized Christians is that it brings into focus the true nature of a Western media elite that is silent in the face of real anti-religious persecution while acting apoplectically when, say, it is Muslims who, upon allegedly being viewed suspiciously at an American airport, claim to have suffered “Islamophobia.”

Some genuinely, thoroughly, bad stuff has been happening to Christians in various parts of the world multiple times a day, every day, and for a very long time.

(1) Last year, on Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the Christian calendar, Christians who were in the midst of their religious services in Sri Lanka experienced the bombing of three of their churches.   

Three hotels were also bombed.

Over 300 people were killed, with 176 children losing either one parent or both.

Islamic militants were responsible.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Freedom Center Plans Title VI Suit Against Claremont Colleges for Funding Jew Hatred The Colleges violated President Trump’s executive order barring federal funding for anti-Semitic hate. Sara Dogan

Posted By on February 10th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/freedom-center-plans-title-vi-suit-against-sara-dogan/

In a letter sent to the heads of Pitzer College and Pomona College in Southern California, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, acting with the Dhillon Law Group, put the Claremont Consortium of Colleges on notice that their promotion and funding of anti-Semitic speakers and events is a violation of federal law and will no longer be tolerated.

Over the past several years, Pitzer, Pomona, and the other Claremont Colleges have repeatedly funded anti-Semitic rhetoric and displays on campus—largely organized by the Hamas-funded campus hate group Students for Justice in Palestine—which contribute to a hostile environment for Jewish students.

The letter cites Executive Order 13899 which was signed by President Trump on December 11, 2019. The Order directs executive agencies to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against all prohibited forms of discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism just as vigorously as against all other forms of discrimination prohibited by Title VI. Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.

This is not the first occasion on which the Freedom Center has challenged the Claremont Colleges over their funding and promotion of Jew hatred. Last fall, the Freedom Center named Pitzer as one of the “Top Ten Colleges that Promote Jew Hatred and Incite Terrorism.” Over a thousand printed newspapers containing the report on the prevalence of anti-Semitism at Pitzer were distributed by the Freedom Center on Pitzer’s campus.