ISRAEL Comments turned off

Tel Aviv’s mayor should be drowning in tears Ruthie Blum

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/tel-avivs-mayor-should-be-drowning-in-tears/

An unfathomable tragedy struck a young couple, and what followed were statements of self-defense and partisan squabbling, instead of proper sorrow for two families.

The response of Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai to the unfathomable death of a young couple in his city over the weekend is nothing short of a disgrace. When details emerged of the way in which 25-year-old childhood sweethearts Din Shoshani and Stav Harari lost their lives on Saturday, Israelis across the nation were shocked, horrified and in tears. All except for Huldai, that is, who was too busy defending himself to express any remorse.

The unfathomable tragedy struck when Shoshani and Harari left their apartment in Shchunat Hatikva—a poor neighborhood in the southern part of the city that has become increasingly attractive to students and struggling artists—and took the elevator to the underground garage, where their car was parked. They had moved into the brand-new building only a couple of months earlier, renting the “penthouse” on the top floor.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe Under Siege from People-Smuggling Gangs by Soeren Kern

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15270/europe-people-smuggling-gangs

Current conditions in Hungary are ripe for a repeat of the migration crisis in 2015 and… the country is now in a “state of crisis”…. More than 100,000 migrants are now gathered in the Western Balkans and although “the situation is still under control,” it is “beginning to look like the big crisis in 2015.” — Szilárd Németh, a senior official at Hungary’s Defense Ministry, December 1, 2019.
Illegal immigration throughout Europe continues unabated. In France, for instance, nearly 20,000 migrants have been arrested so far in 2019, according to the police website France Bleu, which also reported that 189 people smugglers have been arrested since January 1.
In Britain, The Telegraph newspaper reported that Albanian people smugglers were posting advertisements on social media platforms, including Facebook, promoting their ability to get people into Europe. The ads are accompanied by TripAdvisor-style feedback comments from “satisfied” customers…. people smuggling gangs generate profits of up to £6 billion (€7 billion; $8 billion) a year…
The light sentences reflect the leniency of the Spanish justice system, which appears to encourage, rather than deter, people smuggling gangs.

Hungarian police recently discovered two tunnels used to smuggle migrants into Hungary from Serbia. The tunnels were found at the same time that Hungarian police reported a five-fold increase in the number of migrants attempting to enter Hungary.

Hungary is not alone: Border authorities in countries across the European Union are struggling to stanch renewed flows of illegal migration. More than 126,500 migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East illegally entered the EU during 2019, according to the International Organization for Migration.

On November 29, Hungarian police detained 44 migrants who were found walking along a highway near Ásotthalom, a village in southern Hungary. Police later learned that the migrants had crossed into Hungary from Serbia by crawling through a 34-meter (112-foot) hand-dug tunnel.

The oval tunnel, only 50 cm (20 inches) wide and 60 cm (24 inches) high, had been dug as deep as six meters (20 feet) underground. It had gone undetected because of thick foliage in the area and because the soil that was dug out of the tunnel was dumped into a nearby canal.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: ON ANTISEMITISM

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

Antisemitism is rearing its evil head throughout the world. Rallies and parades are welcome expressions, but so often, like the linked arms solidarity marches that follow atrocities, they don’t accomplish anything powerful and lasting.

When Zeev Jabotinsky , the greatest Zionist leader in history,  organized self-defense units in Jewish communities across Europe, his slogan was:

“Better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it!”

His pithy advice reverberates now. rsk

P.S. If guns “trigger” goosebumps at least consider classes in self defense.  That beats dialoguing endlessly anytime.   rsk

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Hysteria Is A Backdoor For Imposing Personal Interests On The Public

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/01/07/climate-hysteria-is-a-backdoor-for-imposing-personal-interests-on-the-public/

The “fight” against global warming is not a selfless movement wholly focused on saving our world but a means for activists to impose their personal desires on the rest of us. They want to shut down farms, stop homebuilding, dictate what we can eat, and are eager to financially reward politically favored groups.

Our first stop on this tour of private crusades is in the United Kingdom, where Ian Boyd, a former chief scientific adviser for the government, is claiming, according to a recent British Guardian report, that “half of the nation’s farmland needs to be transformed into woodlands and natural habitat to fight the climate crisis and restore wildlife.”

“We need a large, radical transformation and we need to do it quickly, in the next decade” said the good professor.

Continued Boyd: “If anybody asked me: ‘If there is one thing I can do to help save the planet, what would it be?’ I would say just eat a lot less meat. It’s the easiest thing to do. I’ve done it.”

And we are therefore supposed to be impressed by his commitment and inspired to follow the great man.

Of course he’s not making the sacrifice alone. Others have chosen to cut back or eliminate their meat intake in the name of saving us from global warming. None were easily found at the last United Nations climate conference in Madrid, where “U.N. bureaucrats chow(ed) down on burgers – while attacking meat.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Reasons to Be Wary of War Rhetoric Julie Kelly

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/06/reasons-to-be-wary-of-war-rhetoric/

It’s imperative that the president knows his leash is short. The neoconservatives that have compounded the mess in the Middle East have torched their credibility and their usefulness. We won’t be fooled again.

Before we address the killing of Qasem Soleimani and the controversial monologue from Tucker Carlson that followed, let’s recap 2019 as a backdrop.

A series published in the Washington Post just before Christmas detailed how our top military, national security, and political leaders have lied about the war in Afghanistan for nearly two decades. The exposé, based on thousands of documents and hundreds of interviews, is an infuriating account of the failed conflict, which killed 2,300 servicemen, wounded more than 20,000, and cost $1 trillion.

“Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public,” the Post reported. “They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul—and at the White House—to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.”

More lies: A report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller confirmed that despite the political class’s two-year crusade to convince the American people that the president won with coordinated help from a foreign foe, Mueller could not find evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to steal the 2016 presidential election.

MEDIA Comments turned off

NY Times Embarrasses Itself Again – On Iran-9/11 Ties No wonder the president calls them “fake news.” Kenneth R. Timmerman

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/ny-times-embarrasses-itself-again-iran-911-ties-kenneth-r-timmerman/

The sloppy New York Times is once-again embarrassing itself. In a prominent “fact-check” piece appearing on Friday, cub reporter Zach Montague ripped into Vice President Mike Pence for a series of tweets that described the terror-drenched record of the ex-Quds Force commander, Qassem Suleymani.

At issue was Pence’s account of Suleymani’s links to the September 11, 2001 attacks on America. In one tweet, the vice president noted that Suleymani and his terrorists “assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in the Untied States.

Assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) January 3, 2020

This prompted the NY Times to snipe, “How Mr. Pence arrived at this number and this account is unclear” since there was nothing in “public United States intelligence” [sic] linking the two, or indeed, anyone in Iran to the 9/11 attacks.

Montague could have consulted former NY Times Philip Shenon, whose 2008 book about the 9/11 Commission reprised a story I revealed several years earlier about the discovery by Commission staff of some 75 highly classified NSA intercepts that spelled out in great detail the help Iran offered al Qaeda in furtherance of the 9/11 plot.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Bernie compares Soleimani to a Russian dissident By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/bernie_compares_soleimani_to_a_russian_dissident.html

One of the things that became very obvious about the Left beginning with 9/11 is that Leftists consider anyone who hates America to be virtuous in some way. It’s irrelevant to them that some America-haters are, within their own countries, people who are legitimately fighting for freedom, while others are actively seeking to impose totalitarianism wherever they can. To a Leftist, America hating is the beginning and the end. Actors’ ideologies and motives are irrelevant.

This world view is how Leftists can come out with statments that are morally blind. Many of us remember that Michael Moore compared the 9/11 killers, who dreamed of a world subordinate to sharia’s brutalities, to America’s Minutemen, who dreamed of a world of small government, individual liberty, and religious freedom. 

We also see this moral blindness Bernie Sanders, one of the Democrat frontrunners. In an interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN about Trump’s decision to terminate Soleimani, Bernie Sanders likened Soleimani, with the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hand, to a dissident in a totalitarian country fighting against his or her own repressive government:

. . . but this guy is, you know, was as bad as he was, an official of the Iranian government. And you unleash . . . then, if China does that, you know, if Russia does that. You know, Russia has been implicated under Putin with assassinating dissidents.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

President Trump trolls Democrat-run cities’ serious mismanagement By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/president_trump_trolls_democratrun_cities_serious_mismanagement.html

Because World War III has not yet started (and we don’t believe that the targeted killing of a terrorist will start it), President Trump is turning his gimlet eye and wonderful sense of humor back to domestic issues. Monday night, he had a message for Democrat-run cities, mostly in California. 

It’s no secret that West Coast Democrat-run cities are having disastrous problems with rampant homelessness. As a West Coast native, I know that some of it has to do with the temperate climate. It’s easier to live on the streets with a temperature range between 50°F and 80°F than it is when the lows drop below freezing and the highs are near 100°F.

Temperature alone, though, does not account for the homeless crisis in California cities, as well as similar crises in other Democrat-run cities such as Seattle or New York. The problem is one of management.

In each of these cities, either state or local Democrat governments made conscious decisions to stop enforcing quality of life laws, such as preventing execratory functions in the street, and to allow low level crime, such as public drug use and small dollar thefts to become formally or informally decriminalized.

In California, voters agreed that property thefts under $950 should be considered petty theft and therefore misdemeanors. Crime soared throughout the state.

POLITICS Comments turned off

AOC Takes Aim at Party Leadership for Indulging Moderates: ‘Democrats Can Be Too Big of a Tent’ By Tobias Hoonhout

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/aoc-takes-aim-at-party-leadership-for-tolerating-moderates-democrats-can-be-too-big-of-a-tent/

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) criticized the Democratic party for its tolerance of relative moderates, saying her own party has become “too big of a tent” in an interview published Monday.

“For so long, when I first got in, people were like, ‘Oh, are you going to basically be a tea party of the left?’ And what people don’t realize is that there is a tea party of the left, but it’s on the right edges, the most conservative parts of the Democratic Party,” Ocasio-Cortez told New York Magazine. “So the Democratic Party has a role to play in this problem, and it’s like we’re not allowed to talk about it.”

The freshman lawmaker also lashed out at party leadership for their intolerance of internal criticism, saying “we’re not allowed to talk about anything wrong the Democratic Party does.”

Ocasio-Cortez pointed to the reaction elicited by her 2018 election as proof that Democrats cater too often to conservative interests, and that the party’s progressive shift was helping Democrats learn “to stretch our wings a little bit on the left.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hawley Introduces Resolution to Dismiss Impeachment Charges against Trump By Tobias Hoonhout

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hawley-introduces-resolution-to-dismiss-impeachment-charges-against-trump/

Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) on Monday introduced a resolution to update Senate rules and dismiss the “bogus impeachment” against President Trump if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to delay in sending impeachment articles to the Senate for a trial.

“Speaker Pelosi started this bogus impeachment by claiming President Trump was an urgent ‘threat to democracy’ who had to be removed now,” Hawley said in a press release. “But after a bipartisan vote against the articles in the House, and with the public opposed to the Democrats’ partisan games, Pelosi has changed her tune.”

“ . . . If Speaker Pelosi is afraid to try her case, the articles should be dismissed for failure to prosecute and Congress should get back to doing the people’s business,” he added.

Hawley, who last month called the impeachment process a “kangaroo court” and said “it’s time to get the president exonerated,” was joined by ten other Republican senators in sponsoring the resolution, which allows the Senate to vote on dismissing articles of impeachment if they are delayed for 25 days or more by the House.