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Europeans Try to Have It Both Ways They expect American protection but aren’t prepared to defend their own countries. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europeans-try-to-have-it-both-ways-11581974424?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

How solid is the West? At last weekend’s Munich Security Conference, the world’s largest gathering of security policy makers and officials, the theme was “Westlessness,” referring to the sense of disorientation that many Europeans feel in this age of America First.

Since the 1940s, U.S. leadership in the service of a united and secure Europe has been the one unchanging feature in the Continental landscape. For generations, the U.S. committed to protect Europe from Russia, maintain bases in Germany to prevent it from threatening its neighbors, and promote European integration. Now Europeans don’t know where they stand, and a mixture of bafflement, anger, disappointment and fear fills the atmosphere at conferences like the one in Munich.

There’s little doubt that Trump administration policies, ranging from trade wars to toughness on Iran, have tested trans-Atlantic relations to the breaking point. But to understand the growing weakness of the Western alliance, Europeans need to spend less time deploring Donald Trump and more time looking in the mirror. A good place to begin is with a Pew poll released earlier this month on the state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Superficially, the poll looks like good news. In 14 European countries plus Canada and the U.S., a median 53% of respondents said they had a favorable view of NATO, while only 27% saw the alliance unfavorably. Despite double-digit declines in NATO’s favorability among the French and the Germans, these numbers aren’t bad. Mr. Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are all less popular in their home countries than NATO is.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Spring 2020 Madness on College Campuses The Marxist indoctrination heats up. Jack Kerwick

Posted By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/spring-2020-madness-college-campuses-jack-kerwick/

The first academic semester of 2020 has only recently gotten underway, and colleges and universities around the country seem to be competing with one another in a feverish race to prove which is most committed to advancing the prevailing leftist dogma of the day.

The College Fix, a student-led campus watchdog publication, is an excellent resource for anyone interested in keeping apprised of the current scene in academia. It’s a particularly invaluable source for parents who are considering investing tens of thousands of dollars into their children’s “education.”

Consider:

At Dartmouth College, an institution that charges $75,000 a year in tuition, students have recently had their classes interrupted by a “Green New Deal” activist. A young woman to whom, out of “courtesy,” The Dartmouth Review refers simply as “Katie,” has spent months disrupting lectures for the purpose of promoting the causes—like the Green New Deal, as well as “free” education and Medicare for all—advanced by the Sunrise Movement and the New Hampshire Youth Movement (NHYM) by which she’s employed.

The NHYM is affiliated with the Sunrise Movement. Unsurprisingly, both are doctrinaire left-wing organizations. “Katie” insists that students are to support only those politicians who “support our values.” As to the nature of those values, there is no doubt, to judge from the card that “Katie” disseminates to students.

There is space on the cards in which students are to supply not only their personal contact information, but, by way of checking off a series of boxes, indicate their political priorities. “I’m voting on February 11th for…” is listed at the top. Beneath that are the following issues: “Immigrant Justice;” “Racial Justice;” “Green New Deal;” “Free College for All;” “Voting Rights;” “Medicare for All;” “LGBTQIAP + Rights;” “Affordable Housing;” “Reproductive Rights;” and “Other.”

“Katie,” in other words, campaigns for the Democratic Party in both college classrooms and campus buildings. In doing so, she violates Dartmouth’s anti-solicitation policies. The latter demarcates a public space on campus for activism.  

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Criminalizing Dissent By Karen D. Hurvitz and Ilya I. Feoktistov

Posted By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/criminalizing_dissent.html

DPS NOTE: Off the wall intolerable. The left has gone fascist: Cancel culture gets police powers and goes after Jewish student at UMass Amherst

Louis Shenker, a 21-year-old junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,  just wanted his MAGA hat back from the graduate student who ripped it off his head on campus. He wore the hat to a December 6, 2018 protest organized by the university’s graduate student union against Trump and local police. Video shows that when Louis, who is 5’6’’ and 140 pounds, arrived wearing the MAGA hat and holding a large sign, he was immediately surrounded by a hostile mob of older grad students cursing at him and calling him a white supremacist. A woman lunged from the mob and snatched Louis’s MAGA hat. Careful not to get caught on camera hitting Louis with their hands, they instead mobbed him like a colony of enraged penguins, using their bodies to push him from all sides, occasionally pecking at his head with their cardboard signs, and chanting in unison: “THE PEOPLE, UNITED, WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED.”

“Get the f**k out of here, you shouldn’t be in an anti-racist march!” screamed the hat thief. A soft-spoken professor in the crowd warned Louis: “It’s actually dangerous for you to come by yourself like that.” As the protesters began to march and Louis tried to keep up while pleading for his hat, many of them, including several graduate student union members dressed in United Auto Workers gear, elbowed Louis into walls, lampposts, and other obstacles. “You act like a Nazi, you’re going to get treated like a Nazi,” a female protester yelled at the Jewish grandson of Holocaust victims.  Louis left without his hat.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Political Trials Should Be Tried Outside of the Beltway Julie Kelly

Posted By on February 18th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/17/political-trials-should-be-tried-outside-of-the-beltway/

The justice system situated in our nation’s capital is toxic, destructive, and demonstrably unfair. Barr should move any trial out of Washington—West Virginia or North Carolina, perhaps?—and at least give the accused a fighting chance.

Attorney General William Barr is enlisting U.S. attorneys outside the Beltway either to investigate or review several high-level cases related to President Trump, the Washington Post reported over the weekend. Barr has asked federal prosecutors from “far-flung offices,” as the Post described it, located in remote places such as Connecticut and Chicago, to handle these sensitive matters.

Barr’s legal shuffling of the deck includes the egregious prosecution of Lt. General Michael Flynn; the investigation into Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign; and new material collected by Rudy Giuliani detailing alleged corruption in Ukraine possibly tied to U.S. politicians.

Given the accusations from Trump foes that Barr is doing Trump’s bidding from his corner office at the Justice Department, this otherwise rational move prompted convulsions of panic in the nation’s capital. Some distraught observers grimly warn that transferring politically charged cases out of the most politically obsessed town in the world is just what Joseph Stalin would do.

David Laufman, a former Justice Department official and Obama donor involved in the agency’s 2016 exoneration of Hillary Clinton, claimed he was “baffled” as to why any federal lawyer would accept such an assignment. “‘Why would they be associating themselves with investigations that are evocative of the manner in which repressive regimes throughout history have behaved?’” Laufman told Post reporters.

BOOKS Comments turned off

A REVIEW OF DIANE BEDERMAN’S “THE SERPENT AND THE RED THREAD-THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF EVIL” BY RSK

Posted By on February 17th, 2020

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1927618134/

The late Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote “anti-Semitism is a light sleeper.”  Perhaps anti-Jewish sentiment dozed for a few years following the Holocaust, but it has awakened with fervor in Europe and in academia in America.

Most regrettably, in an election year anti-Semitism is manifestly ignored by the Democrat party which traditionally had resolutions condemning it in past decades.

Anti-Semitism is almost always ignited by a blood libel, a venal and false conspiracy theory, and more recently, the big lie that Jews occupied ancient Palestinian Arab lands exerting a brutal and oppressive “occupation.”

The big lie is fomented in academia by Arab funds, Moslem/Arab academics, and, alas, by preening and ignorant Jewish purveyors of blatant anti- Semitism and spurious history disguised as “social justice” initiatives.

In a highly readable and informative book “The Serpent and the Red Thread-The definitive Biography of Evil” Diane Weber Bederman traces the history of this ancient hatred and its resurgences from biblical times and the Garden of Eden, the Exile, inquisitions and crusades culminating in the Holocaust when one of every three Jews in the world was exterminated.

As Bederman remarks:

 ”What freezes the blood in one’s veins is the knowledge that the extermination of a people 3500 years old was calmly and meticulously planned over a period of time while the world watched.”

But the blood may well freeze with the blood curdling chants heard today:

”Khybar, Khaybar, O Zionists Hezbollah is coming soon! “

”Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Qur’an is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

”Death to Israel!” Death to the Jews!”

And again the world just watches and listens to this evil.

History, the bible and religious prophecy combine in this excellent book-a wake up message that silence and apathy are collusion.

Diane Weber Bederman is an author, chaplain, journalist, blogger and speaker who is passionate about religion, ethics, politics, and mental health. She has been published in many media outlets including Huffington Post Canada, Times of Israel, Arutz Sheva and Canada Free Press. She is the author of three books. Back to the Ethic:Reclaiming Western Values; Anatomy of Fake News in the Era of Donald Trump; and The Serpent and the Red Thread: The Definitive Biography of Evil, now included in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Library in Israel. RSK

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FBI Unlawfully Passed Classified Intel to Steele It’s like a playground game of telephone, only big players used each other to confirm bogus intel. Nate Jackson

Posted By on February 17th, 2020

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68638-fbi-unlawfully-passed-classified-intel-to-steele-2020-02-17

Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer hired by Hillary Clinton and the DNC through GPS Fusion to dig make up dirt on Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, is back in the news, along with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI. And the circular corruption just gets crazier.

“A month before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI met Christopher Steele in Rome and apparently unlawfully shared with the foreign opposition researcher some of the bureau’s most closely held secrets, according to unpublicized disclosures in the recent Justice Department Inspector General report on abuses of federal surveillance powers.” So begins the latest revelation of deep-state corruption, courtesy of Eric Felten and RealClearInvestigations.

Felten continues, “Much of the public reporting regarding this meeting has focused on the information Steele shared with the FBI — and the many reasons agents should have doubted its credibility. But largely neglected has been the opposite side of the equation — what the FBI told Steele. The Inspector General reports that the bureau revealed to him much of the highly classified information that it had gathered regarding alleged Trump-Russia links.” That included information on Trump campaign staffers Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn — information known only by a select few FBI officials.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DOJ Furor Latest Attempt To Help Democrats Hide Spygate, Undermine Elections By Joy Pullmann

Posted By on February 17th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/17/doj-furor-latest-attempt-to-help-democrats-hide-spygate-undermine-elections/

When the cockroaches are all scurrying across the floor, you can be sure that somebody shone a light on their nest.

Another spin operation appears to be afoot to thwart Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the Russia collusion hoax and others perpetrated by high-ranking federal bureaucrats. The eye of the hurricane this weekend has focused on the Department of Justice, with news Friday that an assistant U.S. attorney declined to press charges against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for documented lying to federal investigators under oath.

Becket Adams explains that

In 2016, McCabe, who is now a paid CNN contributor, leaked sensitive details of the bureau’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation to the press. He then misled members of the FBI’s Inspection Division when they interviewed him about the leaks, according to a February 2018 Justice Department inspector general report. McCabe provided investigators with four misleading statements, three of which were while he was under oath.

Giving false statements to federal investigators is a crime. In fact, it is the same crime for which the Justice Department went after President Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

On Friday, news broke that Barr “has appointed the top federal prosecutor in St. Louis to review the criminal case against Michael Flynn – former national security adviser to President Donald Trump,” according to Reuters. This all occured in the same week an assistant U.S. attorney recommended up to nine years in prison for former Trump campaign associate Roger Stone on the grounds that he lied about gossiping about what WikiLeaks knew about Hillary Clinton’s emails.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hungarian MEP: Mass illegal migration fueling anti-Semitism in Western Europe by Arthur Lyons

Posted By on February 17th, 2020

https://voiceofeurope.com/2020/02/hungarian-mep-mass-illegal-migration-fueling-anti-semitism-in-western-europe/

One of the primary forces fueling anti-Semitism in Western Europe is the enormous number of illegal immigrants from Muslim countries that places like the UK, Germany, Sweden, and France have taken in, a Hungarian MEP said earlier this week.

Balázs Hidvéghi, an MEP from Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, said on Wednesday at a European Parliament session on fighting anti-Semitism and racism, that mass illegal migration from Muslim countries is one of the major factors that has contributed to the unsettling trend of growing anti-Semitism in the western part of the continent, Remix News reports.

“Attacks against Jews also support the [position that] illegal immigration into Europe cannot be allowed,” Hidvéghi argued during the discussion.

The Fidesz MEP also argued that by supporting the mass movement of people from the Middle East into Europe, the EU is effectively importing Middle Eastern conflicts unnecessarily into Europe.

Hidvéghi mentioned that while anti-Semitic incidents have risen throughout Western Europe, in Hungary – which is home to a Jewish diaspora of roughly 100,000 – the Jewish community doesn’t have to worry about being attacked in public places.

“The only possible approach to anti-Semitism is zero tolerance,” Hidvéghi said, adding “Hungary’s public and politicians fully agree on that point.”

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

The corruption of Barack Obama – How to wake the media up about TRUMP J.B Shurk

Posted By on February 17th, 2020

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/how_to_wake_the_media_up_about_trump.html

The national media are flabbergasted that Americans won’t consent to President Trump’s removal from office.  How can so many of his compatriots be indicted and so many government bureaucrats condemn his behavior without giving them what they desire: self-assurance that they are “on the right side of history”?

If they ever wish to understand, the critical starting point in their education is not the current presidency, but the last one.  Although there are numerous ways to describe the present divide in America, one of the simpler is thus: those Americans who take Barack Obama at his word that his presidency was historically “scandal free” and those Americans who see the unrelenting stream of Deep State attempts to take down President Trump as a continuing coup and the natural extension of an unethical, criminal, and at times unconstitutional Obama presidency.

For those of us in the latter camp, Barack Obama presided over a corrupt administration and used his historic election as the first non-white American president as a get-out-of-jail-free card to abuse his power while silencing his critics.

Whataboutery is frowned upon now that President Trump is in office, but if President Trump had done a tiny percentage of what Obama orchestrated, he actually would be in federal prison.  Imagine what would have happened if President Trump had done the following:

POLITICS Comments turned off

Stacey Abrams Says She’s Open to Joining Dem Ticket as Veep after Dismissing Idea of Running for ‘Second Place’ By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on February 17th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/stacey-abrams-says-shes-open-to-joining-dem-ticket-as-veep-after-vowing-not-to-run-for-second-place/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_

Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Georgia who called out alleged voter suppression during her election, said Monday that she “would be honored” to be the vice presidential candidate on the 2020 Democratic ticket.

“It would be doing a disservice to every woman of color, every woman of ambition, every child who wants to think beyond their known space for me to say no or to pretend, ‘Oh, no, I don’t want it,’” Abrams said on ABC’s “The View.” “Of course I want it. Of course I want to serve America. Of course I want to be a patriot and do this work.”

Abrams shot to notoriety in 2018 when she ran in Georgia to become the country’s first black female governor. She lost the election by 1.4 percentage points to her Republican opponent, Georgia’s secretary of state at the time, Brian Kemp, who enforced one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country while he was running against Abrams. Abrams has refused to concede the election ever since, alleging that Kemp engaged in voter suppression.

Abrams’s openness to accepting a vice presidential nomination comes after she signaled last year she would only run as a presidential candidate.

“You don’t run for second place,” she said in a previous appearance on “The View” in March.