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Germany’s Pro-Iran, Anti-Israel Foreign Policy by Soeren Kern

Posted By on August 12th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14699/germany-iran-israel

Germany has, in fact, been decidedly hostile to Israel in recent years… Germany continues to provide millions of euros annually to organizations that promote anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) and “lawfare” campaigns, anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and violence, according to NGO Monitor.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in 2008 that Israel’s security is “non-negotiable” and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in 2018 that he went into politics “because of Auschwitz.” In practice, however, Germany consistently appears to prioritize its relations with Israel’s enemies.

Instex, an initiative of German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, would enable European trade with Iran despite U.S. sanctions. It would facilitate barter-based trade with Iran in products such as pharmaceuticals and foods, but Tehran has repeatedly insisted that Instex must include trade in oil for the mechanism to make economic sense.

Seven months after its formation, Instex remains non-operational, in part because Iran still does not comply with international legal standards to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.

A senior German diplomat appointed to head an EU barter system that would enable European companies to sidestep U.S. sanctions on Iran stepped down after giving an interview in which he criticized the existence of Israel and praised Tehran’s ballistic missile program.

The episode — the latest of a series of occurrences that have laid bare the anti-Israel foundation of Germany’s foreign policy — is an embarrassing setback for the German government and will complicate its efforts to salvage the Iran nuclear deal.

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DAVID HORNIK’S BOOK: “BESIDE THE STILL WATER”

Posted By on August 12th, 2019

P. David Hornik is one of Israel’s best journalists and commentators who has made the case for Israel in the most articulate and elegant prose. His book Choosing Life in Israel is an inspiring account of his life as an immigrant in a homeland far removed from the relative security and comfort of America, detailing the trials, tribulations, and ultimate pride and pleasure of life in his adopted country.
He has written a novel, Beside the Still Waters, which takes place in America and Israel. His protagonist is a writer, Steve Sandorsky, who is introduced to the reader as a kid growing up in a rural area near Schenectady, New York. Steve is the child of a brooding and uncommunicative father whose parents were Holocaust victims, and a mother who is not Jewish. When Steve learns at age eleven that according to Jewish religious law, as someone with only a Jewish father, he’s not considered Jewish, he’s profoundly shocked and feels himself from that point on, for a number of years, to be drifting in a no-man’s-land without a real identity.

But Steven’s romantic encounters, bouts of depression, fringe alcoholism, and marital stress increasingly propel him toward Zionism and identification with Israel, until he takes the huge step of moving there. And it’s in Israel that the second part of the novel takes place.

Is it autobiographical? I don’t know, but the spirited description of Israel’s dilemmas, and Steve’s staunch defense of his adopted nation as an emerging journalist, are reminiscent of the author.

A great deal of this highly engaging and readable novel consists of dialogue in various forms–conversations, phone calls, emails. In all of these the reader hears the voices–the angst, the joys, the disappointments, the disillusion and the doubt, of all the very vivid and varied characters.

Ultimately the novel is both romantic and an introduction to Israel, a nation of outsize contribution to the world despite a largely hostile environment. It’s powerfully affecting in both dimensions, most of all when they start to mesh as Steve confronts his true challenges.

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The Humanitarian Hoax of “Assisted” Suicide: Killing America With Kindness – hoax 43 by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on August 12th, 2019

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian was the Michigan pathologist and euthanasia advocate who supported a patient’s right to die by physician-assisted suicide. His famous remark, “Dying is not a crime,” launched a public debate about the ethics of physician assisted-suicide.

Dr. Kevorkian was a pioneer in the controversial matter of physician-assisted suicide. Dubbed Dr. Death by the media, Kevorkian’s career and trials were widely publicized, and discussions about the ethics of physician-assisted suicide went mainstream. Between 1994-1997 Kevorkian was tried four times for physician-assisted suicide.

In 1990, Dr. Kevorkian was arrested and convicted of second-degree murder for his role in the physician-assisted suicide of Thomas Youk 52, a patient in the final stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Kevorkian was sentenced to 10-25 years in prison and then granted parole after serving 8 years. He devoted his last years to lecturing and changing the laws on physician-assisted suicide.

As individuals living in a free country we embrace our Constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what about our right to die? Dr. Kevorkian raised public consciousness about terminally ill patients and their right to die. The problem, of course, is the opportunity for abuse in “assisting” suicides.

Legalizing assisted suicide is legalizing self-murder, so beyond any religious opposition to “playing God,” there is the secular opposition based on the possibility of murder disguised as suicide. That brings us to “politically-assisted” suicide, and the increasingly suspicious and ever-growing Clinton family body count. WHAT??

It is impossible to ignore the growing list of individuals scheduled to testify against the Clintons who are mysteriously found dead before their court dates. Some have been ruled murders and some ruled suicides – all are suspicious. Let’s take a look at a few.

March of 2015: FBI Special Agent David Raynor was found stabbed and murdered with his own gun the day before he was scheduled to testify before the US Federal Grand Jury. Raynor was expected to expose that Clinton acted illegally to coverup the Fast and Furious scandal to protect Obama. Raynor was leading the investigation into the murder of one of the main witnesses, homicide Detective Sean Suiter, who Raynor believed had been killed before he could testify that the Obama administration, “. . .was criminally complicit in allowing guns to flow into the hands of criminals on the Mexican border.” Politically-assisted suicide?

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Sydney M. Williams “Murder in the U.S.A.”

Posted By on August 12th, 2019

swtotd.blogspot.com

swtotd.blogspot.com

New Hampshire’s White Mountains, with their rugged, natural beauty and the sense of peace that whispers through the Pines, Hemlocks and Spruce that comprise their forests, seemed a long distance from the mass murders in El Paso and Dayton, as well as the never-ending killing of – mostly – young, Black, inner-city males. But this is a big country and it holds people of every ethnicity, nationality and religion – most all who are good, but a few who are evil. When united, we are morally strong; when divided we are vulnerable.

What unites us is the idea of America. At our core, we love what America represents – the freedom it gives us and the opportunities it provides. Among our freedoms are those that allow us to speak up when we disagree, to protest policies that are at odds with ours. We can, in fact, insult our President. It is this personal freedom and the opportunities for social and economic advancement that attract so many to our shores.

What divides us has been the rise of extremism, driven by a sense of being ignored and by politicians who find compartmentalization of the electorate – by gender, race, religion and sexual orientation – politically opportunistic. The result is a culture that promotes identity politics and victimization; hatred is their progeny. In an August 6 op-ed for the New York Times, David Brooks wrote: “The struggle between pluralism and anti-pluralism is one of the great death struggles of our time, and it is being fought on every front.” What he wrote I believe to be true, but he did not connect anti-pluralism with politics of identity. Pluralism is preferred by those who believe in integration, not just of race, gender and religion but of ideas. It was what drove Martin Luther King, while Anti-pluralism is a consequence of those who thrive on politics of identity – be it white nationalism, Antifa, BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, LGBTQ, or neo-Nazis. These lead to politics of hate and, thence, to acts of terror. We would be wise to heed David Brooks’ call for pluralism. After all, it is the motto on the Great Seal of the United States – e Pluribus Unum.

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THE LEFT’S RACE WAR There are some very bad people on both sides of the race obsession. By James Kirchick see note please

Posted By on August 12th, 2019

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/289037/the-lefts-race-war

I think Kirchick’s bashing of Trump is extreme and proves no racism or deliberate bigotry…., nor is there an “aggressively race obsessed vision of America.” I post this because his description of the left is very accurate…..rsk

In just the past two weeks, Donald Trump has told four ethnic minority congresswomen, three of them natural born citizens, to “go back” to the “broken and crime infested” “countries” “from which they came,” described the African American Congressman Elijah Cummings as a “bully” and his city of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” and picked a fight with the Rev. Al Sharpton, pronouncing him “a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score” who “Hates Whites & Cops!”

Trump’s game isn’t difficult to discern. He is practicing the same sort of resentment-based, racial-identity politics that has fueled his political rise since the earlier part of this decade, when he began expressing doubts that the first black president was actually born in the United States.

Trump’s motives are mean, his tactics distasteful, and his manner of expression bigoted and unpresidential. But in the race to see who can press harder on the race button, Trump has a worthy opponent in today’s left. Just as it is hard to see Trump as anything other than a bigot and a button-presser, it is similarly impossible to deny the radical transformation of the progressive intellectual and activist universe in the nearly three years since Trump was elected into a self-appointed politburo that is trying to impose its own aggressively race-obsessed vision on America.

Indeed, many of Trump’s opponents on the left have turned themselves into committed ideologues with a programmatic understanding of human behavior and human differences rooted in some biological component that is impossible or nearly impossible to change. The way the left talks incessantly about “white men,” or openly puts membership in victim groups above individual rights and virtues, is the essence of what most people mean by racism. Not “reverse racism”—but real, actual, racism.

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VACATION 8/7 UNTIL 8/13

Posted By on August 7th, 2019

NO POSTINGS UNTIL 8/13

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Re-sinking CUNY The City University of New York moves to eliminate objective testing—reversing the very reforms that had pulled it out of a long decline. Bob McManus

Posted By on August 7th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/cuny–objective-testing

“Let’s face it: if more people were aware of how badly the school system performs, there’s no telling what might happen. So the three R’s must be replaced by the three D’s—distraction, deflection, and deceit. The integrity of the City University of New York is just the latest casualty in New York’ ongoing education tragedy.”

The City University of New York has announced plans to eliminate objective testing intended to determine which of its incoming students can do college-level work and which require remediation. Politico reports that CUNY chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez plans to move the university “away from high-stakes testing” while “reducing its reliance on placement tests students must take to determine whether they need remedial interventions.”

CUNY has been here once before—and the results nearly killed the university. Adjusted for euphemism, the decision points toward a reversal of 1990s-era reforms that pulled the university out of a long period of stagnation and decline. Abandoning testing would represent an effective return to so-called open-admissions policies from the 1960s and 1970s. Those allowed virtually anybody who could stumble through CUNY’s front door to enroll. Eventually, the university’s classrooms filled up with unqualified students, severely degraded the quality of education, and reduced the once-great university to a national laughingstock. CUNY’s rescue, a joint venture of then-governor George Pataki, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, and others, was not easily achieved—and it will doubtless take some time for the university’s new admissions policy to start showing damaging effects. But that’s just a matter of time.

The new policy is a huge win for teachers’ unions and unaccountable bureaucrats because it greatly relieves pressure on New York City’s public schools to do better. It was achieved with the silent acquiescence of Governor Andrew Cuomo, the only politician in the state who could have stopped it. Back in 2012, Cuomo declared himself the chief lobbyist for New York’s public school students, and for a while, he really was—promoting and protecting charter schools, strengthening accountability for teachers and school administrators, and—critically—supporting student-performance benchmarks. In recent years, though, he’s been silent, standing aside as the Albany legislature refused to allow New York City’s astonishingly effective charter school movement to expand; as hard-won teacher-accountability reforms were peeled away and discarded; and as the state Board of Regents moved to abandon its 150-year-old practice of proficiency testing of high school students statewide. And now CUNY is following suit, embracing a new open-admissions era.

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How Hajj Amin el Husseini’s Jew-Annihilationist Ideology Was Rooted In Islam, Not Nazism VIDEO

Posted By on August 7th, 2019

https://youtu.be/ZfljAZ04wzQ

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Forty Years of Iranian Intolerance by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on August 7th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14633/iranian-intolerance

What, one has to ask, does Iran’s Islamic regime have to fear from the country’s Christians, Baha’is, Zoroastrians, Sufis, Sunni Muslims, or Jews? Yet its treatment of these minorities is so repressive that it seems not unreasonable to ask if the clerics might be afraid of what they consider challenges to their fantasy of pure Islamic identity.

So why this persecution? Because they represent a challenge to the radical shari’a law doctrines of the clergy, who impose Ayatollah Khomeini’s religio-politico system of Velayat-e Faqih (rule by the theocratic Islamic government).

“If they [Muslims] had gotten rid of the punishment for apostasy, Islam would not exist today.” – Islamic leader Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The Iranian people who have been fighting for their freedom all these years deserve our immediate help.

The regime that currently rules Iran was set up after a revolution in early 1979, and after forty years remains in power. It will have escaped no one’s attention that relations between Iran and the West, notably the United States, have never been healthy and in recent months have deteriorated further.

The United States has placed increasingly harsh sanctions on its clerical foe, including some on Iran’s hard-line Supreme Leader (Rahbar-e A’zam), the ageing but still powerful Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. These sanctions are justified on several grounds: Iran’s massive involvement in Middle East conflicts beyond its borders (For example, in Syria Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Venezuela and the Gaza Strip); its financial, moral, and physical support for major terrorist bodies such as Hizbullah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad; its funding and arming of its own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), now designated as a terrorist entity by the US; its carrying out of executions of dissidents, homosexuals, religious minorities, among others, making it responsible for over half of all recorded executions worldwide; its enforcement of strict codes of modesty on women, who can be arrested merely for wearing a hijab badly or not at all – a policy that was reinforced in 2016 and 2019 through the recruitment of thousands of morality police; its mass arrests, imprisonments and murders of dissidents, human rights activists, religious minorities, and others, with little or no evidence and without access to defence, and its rejection of diplomatic efforts to secure the release of the innocent British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe because its government refuses to recognize the international standard of dual citizenship.

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Pakistan: Abduction, Forced Conversion of Non-Muslim Girls by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on August 7th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14574/pakistan-forced-conversion

“The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reports that the police often turn a blind eye to reports of abduction and forced conversions thereby creating impunity for perpetrators. The police will often either refuse to record a First Information Report or falsify the information, thereby denying families the chance to take their case any further.” — Report conducted in 2018 by the University of Birmingham’s Commonwealth Initiative for Freedom of Religion or Belief, United Kingdom, 2018.

“Local police and political leaders… are often accused of being complicit in forced marriage and conversion cases by failing to properly investigate them. If such cases are investigated or adjudicated, the young woman is reportedly questioned in front of the man she was forced to marry, which creates pressure on her to deny any coercion.” — Annual Report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2019.

“The most important reason for this [abduction and conversion] is the desire to increase Pakistan’s Muslim population, which stems from the Islamic teaching that that a person who converts one non-Muslim to Islam will be granted a place in paradise.” — Sardar Mushtaq Gill, Pakistani human rights lawyer and head of the Legal Evangelical Association Development (LEAD-Pakistan).

“The judiciary are often subject to fear of reprisal from extremist elements, in other cases the judicial officers’ personal beliefs influence them into accepting the claims made that the woman/girl converted on her own free will.” — Report conducted in 2018 by the University of Birmingham’s Commonwealth Initiative for Freedom of Religion or Belief, United Kingdom, 2018.

“Higher authorities also have done little to nothing to pass legislation specifically criminalizing this issue….International pressure on Pakistan is an important element of seeking to end this abuse. Without motivation coming from outside the country, it is very unlikely the Pakistani government will listen to minority leaders and civil society to pass laws combating this issue.” — William Stark, South Asia regional manager at the International Christian Concern.

On July 12, Hindus and Sikhs gathered in the Sindh province of Pakistan to protest the kidnapping of young girls, their forced conversion to Islam and subsequent marriage to their abductors. Demonstrators at the rally also railed against the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan for not safeguarding minority rights in the Muslim-majority country.