WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China: “Protecting” the Arctic by Debalina Ghoshal

Posted By on June 17th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14367/china-arctic

The Arctic — where both the United States and Russia maintain a military presence — is known for being rich in hydrocarbons. The Chinese, in their claims to such a valuable energy source, clearly do not wish to be left behind.

As China already has deployed anti-ship cruise missiles and surface-to-air missiles — while planning to build and deploy floating nuclear reactors — in the South China Sea, it is certainly plausible that Beijing has similar plans for the Arctic.

Both China’s Arctic Policy and its Belt and Road Initiative seem paths towards what appears to be China’s aim at achieving global hegemony.

China’s aggressive behavior in the South China Sea by now is old news, but Beijing’s recent moves in the Arctic have been attracting attention.

The Arctic — where both the United States and Russia maintain a military presence — is known for being rich in hydrocarbons. The Chinese, in their claims to such a valuable energy source, clearly do not wish to be left behind.

Just as Chinese President Xi Jinping has been pushing the Belt and Road Initiative, he also aims to develop a “Polar Silk Road” for shipping lanes, which he believes are opening up due to glacial melting caused by global warming. This belief appears to stem from the “open polar sea” theory, according to which the polar seas created by climate change ultimately could be exploited for commercial purposes.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

When Normality Became Abnormal By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 17th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/16/when-normality-became-abnormal/

Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention. Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.

Everyone knew the Iran deal was a way for the mullahs to buy time and hoard their oil profits, to purchase or steal nuclear technology, to feign moderation, and to trade some hostages for millions in terrorist-seeding cash, and then in a few years spring an announcement that it had the bomb.

No one wished to say that. Trump did. He canceled the flawed deal without a second thought.

Iran is furious, but in a far weaker—and eroding—strategic position with no serious means of escaping devastating sanctions, general impoverishment, and social unrest. So a desperate Tehran knows that it must make some show of defiance. Yet it accepts that if it were to launch a missile at a U.S. ship, hijack an American boat, or shoot down an American plane, the ensuing tit-for-tat retaliation might target the point of Iranian origin (the port that launched the ship, the airbase from which the plane took off, the silo from which the missile was launched) rather than the mere point of contact—and signal a serial stand-off 10-1 disproportionate response to every Iranian attack without ever causing a Persian Gulf war.

Everyone realized the Paris Climate Accord was a way for elites to virtual signal their green bona fides while making no adjustments in their global managerial lifestyles—at best. At worst, it was a shake-down both to transfer assets from the industrialized West to the “developing world” and to dull Western competitiveness with ascending rivals like India and China. Not now. Trump withdrew from the agreement, met or exceeded the carbon emissions reductions of the deal anyway, and has never looked back at the flawed convention. The remaining signatories have little response to the U.S. departure, and none at all to de facto American compliance to their own targeted goals.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Dep. of Ed Investigates Foreign Cash Influence Over Universities Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on June 17th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274033/dep-ed-investigates-foreign-cash-influence-over-daniel-greenfield

Shortly, the media will discover the foreign collusion that it doesn’t want to see investigated.

The U.S. Education Department has opened investigations into foreign funding at Georgetown University and Texas A&M University as part of a broader push to monitor international money flowing to American colleges:

“The inquiries are part of a broader campaign to scrutinize foreign funding going to universities and to improve reporting by schools, according to a Trump administration official familiar with the effort.

More schools probably will face questioning as federal officials focus on an issue they see as crucial to transparency and national security, according to the official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the investigations and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Federal law requires U.S. colleges to report contracts and donations from foreign sources totaling $250,000 or more, but past filings from Georgetown and Texas A&M “may not fully capture” that information, according to the letters.

As an example, department officials wrote, both schools should have reported funding related to branch campuses they operate in Qatar, an oil-rich nation in the Mideast that hosts the outposts of several U.S. colleges.

POLITICS Comments turned off

How Buttigieg Entered the Anti-Israel Echo Chamber And adopted Obama’s foreign policy. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on June 17th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274003/how-buttigieg-entered-anti-israel-echo-chamber-daniel-greenfield

Last year, Pete Buttigieg, then the mayor of a failing Indiana city with a small Jewish community, and with unlikely aspirations for higher office, visited Israel. He suggested that Israel’s approach to security offered “a very important lesson in that that hopefully Americans can look to”.

Buttigieg had joined an American Jewish Committee delegation of mayors and came back with a seeming understanding of Israel’s precarious security situation and the danger of simplistic solutions.

 “One of the first things that was very clear to us is that there is not a unified or single voice for the Palestinian people. Most people aren’t aware of the difference between what’s happening in Gaza, run by Hamas in a way that is contributing to a lot of misery there, but also totally different than an environment where you would have a negotiating partner across the table,” he observed.

Fast forward a year and Buttigieg is running for president and threatening to cut aid to Israel.

In his foreign policy address, he falsely claimed that “the Netanyahu government is turning away from peace” and warned Israel, while, referring to himself in the third person, that “President Buttigieg would take steps to ensure that American taxpayers won’t help foot the bill.”

What happened? There are two answers.

When Buttigieg was running a conservative city with an active Jewish and Christian community, where it’s not unusual to see churches flying the Israeli flag, it was safe for him to be more pro-Israel. On the campaign trail of a radical primary, where anti-Israel protesters dogged his steps, things changed.

But the bigger answer goes inside the foreign policy factory to see how the sausage gets made.

Buttigieg’s foreign policy team is headed by Doug Wilson. Wilson, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and the highest-ranking gay Pentagon official, is an obvious choice. Wilson chairs the Board of Advisors at the Truman National Security Project making him the guy to talk to for 2020 Democrats like Buttigieg interested in developing a foreign policy position at the national level.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Will Dems’ Presidential Fate Repeat Past Wins, or Past Losses? Where the battle stands — and what may tilt the scales. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on June 17th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273997/will-dems-presidential-fate-repeat-past-wins-or-bruce-thornton

Many Republicans are feeling optimistic about Trump’s reelection in 2020. The Mueller investigation, on which Democrats’ pinned their hopes for mortally wounding the president, has crumbled like a bride’s first pie crust. AG Barr, unlike the lollygagging Jeff Sessions, is vigorously investigating the corruption in the FBI and DOJ that led to government agencies’ interference in an election in favor of Hillary Clinton, and then their attempts to engineer a bloodless coup to remove a legally elected president. The economy is roaring, with numbers on growth, employment, and productivity not seen in decades. And international rivals like Iran and China are now being confronted rather than coddled.

Meanwhile, the Democrats appear to have lost their political minds. They have sunk deeper into the swamps of zombie socialism, illiberal identity politics, 1984-style censorship, legalized infanticide, climate-change apocalypse, and proposals to dismantle the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For Republicans, these excesses portend a variation on their party’s victories in 1972 or 1980. But Dems apparently believe they can reprise Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s triumphs in 1992 and 2008. Each of these elections recalls the circumstances and issues that so far are shaping 2020.

Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972 over George McGovern, who won only one state and lost his home state, was a decisive rejection of the Sixties on behalf of the “Silent Majority” angered over this attempted fundamental transformation of America. The sneering assault on traditional religion, customs, mores, and morals, one abetted by the media, popular culture, and universities, aroused a sleeping electoral giant. Nixon’s deft handling of the Vietnam War during his first term, which lead to a draw-down of U.S. forces––from over half a million in 1968 to a mere 50 in 1973–– and the end of the draft, took the war off the table despite the antiwar media’s earlier attempts to spin North Vietnam’s 1968 Tet Offensive, a disaster for the North, into an omen of American military defeat.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ibrahim: How CAIR Forced the US Army War College onto Its Knees The author of “Sword and Scimitar” gives the inside story of an ominous surrender. Jamie Glazov

Posted By on June 17th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274038/ibrahim-how-cair-forced-us-army-war-college-its-jamie-glazov

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Raymond Ibrahim, a scholar of Islam, prolific writer, and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013); and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007) He has appeared on C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and PBS; his writings have appeared in the New York Times Syndicate, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst.  A sought after speaker, Ibrahim has briefed governmental agencies, including the U.S Strategic Command, lectured at the National Intelligence University, and testified before Congress.

Introduction: On June 10, the US Army War College (USAWC) surrendered to the demands of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—an “unindicted co-conspirator,” to quote the U.S. Dept. of Justice, in the largest terror funding case in American history, and a designated “terrorist organization” for nations such as the UAE.

CAIR’s hysterical propaganda campaign focused on presenting Ibrahim—a native Arabic speaker of Egyptian/Middle Eastern descent—as a “racist” and “white nationalist” who, if allowed to speak before the War College, would incite American soldiers to start murdering Muslims in the street.  In response, the US Army War College capitulated and canceled Ibrahim’s long-planned lecture on his newest book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, which was scheduled for this coming Wednesday, June 19, at the War College, located in Carlisle, Barracks, PA.

Frontpage: Welcome, Raymond, to Frontpage Interview. It’s an honor to have you here.

Let’s get right to it. What happened?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Unlike House, U.S. Senate Unanimously Condemns Anti-Semitism By Melissa Langsam Braunstein

Posted By on June 17th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/14/unlike-house-u-s-senate-unanimously-condemns-anti-semitism/

When you write about anti-Semitism, there’s typically not much good news to report; the world’s oldest hatred has been making a comeback not only overseas, but also here in the US of A. So, it’s both good and important to pause and celebrate the U.S. Senate unanimously passing a resolution that unequivocally condemns anti-Semitism.

Where the House of Representatives fumbled, the Senate succeeded. And thank G-d for that.

In March, the House struggled to rebuke blatantly anti-Semitic remarks from freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar. Rather than forcefully denounce anti-Semitism within their own ranks, House members passed a watered-down resolution calling out out all hatred. While that message was unobjectionable, it was also totally non-responsive to the historical moment.

By contrast, Sens. Ted Cruz and Tim Kaine led the Senate in embracing a resolution yesterday that squarely condemns anti-Semitism in all of its forms. The Senate resolution offers a sweeping historical view of anti-Semitism across borders and millennia. It recognizes that the virus of anti-Semitism is different than other forms of hatred, has occurred both overseas and domestically, and that it requires a unique, targeted condemnation.

In addition to citing pogroms, forced conversions, and the Holocaust, the resolution mentions that Jews retain the dubious honor of being the most targeted religious group for hate crimes. While Omar isn’t named, the resolution alludes to her poisonous remarks, noting that “Jews have faced, and continue to face, false accusations of divided loyalty between the United States and Israel, [and] false claims that they purchase political power with money.” Given the struggle to pass anti-anti-boycott legislation on the Hill this year, the resolution also crucially castigates those who would “boycott, confiscate or destroy Jewish businesses.”

ISRAEL, POLITICS Comments turned off

Resolution Supporting Two State Solution to counter any attempt Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to annex Sections of Judea and Samaria

Posted By on June 17th, 2019

A group of Democratic U.S. senators are drafting a resolution declaring U.S. support for a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, The purpose of the resolution is to counter any attempt Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to annex the West Bank. Something that was promised by Netanyahu during his previous election campaign.

The draft resolution was made by Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley and co-sponsored by U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders, Tammy Duckworth, Elizabeth Warren, Dianne Feinstein, Tammy Baldwin, Tom Udall and Dick Durbin.

The resolution says that “the policy of the United States should be to preserve conditions conducive to a negotiated two-state solution”.

“Unilateral annexation of portions of the West Bank would jeopardize prospects for a two-state solution, harm Israel’s relationship with its Arab neighbors, threaten Israel’s Jewish and democratic identity, and undermine Israel’s security,” the resolution says.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Florida sets an important precedent By Arnold Cusmariu

Posted By on June 17th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/florida_sets_an_important_precedent.html

As reported in the Miami Herald News, on Friday 14 June, 2019 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Federal Immigration Enforcement bill, SB 168, keeping a promise he had made during his campaign for governor.

Here is a summary of the bill’s provisions shown on the Florida Senate website:

Prohibits a state entity, local governmental entity, or law enforcement agency from having a sanctuary policy, which is a law, policy, practice, procedure, or custom that restricts a law enforcement agency’s ability to communicate or exchange information with a federal immigration agency on immigration enforcement matters or from complying with immigration detainers.
Provides procedures for a court to follow to reduce a defendant’s sentence by up to 12 days and thereby permit a law enforcement agency to transfer the defendant to a federal facility and complete the remaining 12 days of the sentence.
Requires a law enforcement agency that has custody of someone who is subject to an immigration detainer to notify the judge of the detainer, record in the person’s file the existence of the detainer, and comply with the detainer.
Requires a county correctional facility to enter into an agreement with a federal immigration agency for the payment of costs associated with housing and detaining defendants.
Provides that the Governor, in an exercise of his or her constitutional duties, may initiate judicial proceedings against any executive or administrative state, county, or municipal officer to enforce compliance with duties under the act or restrain unauthorized actions contrary to the act.
Permits the Attorney General to institute an action for a violation of this law or to prevent a violation of the law.
Requires any sanctuary policies currently in effect be repealed within 90 days after the effective date of the act.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Director of Berlin’s museum resigns over Tweet endorsing antisemitic BDS  Benjamin Weinthal

Posted By on June 17th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/German-Museum-director-sparking-BDS-controversy-resigns-after-condemnations-fly-592564

The director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Peter Schäfer, announced his resignation on Friday “to avoid further damage” a week after The Jerusalem Post first reported that the institution endorsed the BDS campaign on the museum’s Twitter feed.

The pressure for Schäfer’s removal rose over the past week, and experts in the field of antisemitism told the Post that they implored German Culture Minister Monika Grütters, who oversees the board of the museum foundation, to take action against Schäfer and the antisemitism scandals at the museum.

“All those responsible must help ensure that the Jewish Museum Berlin can again concentrate on its important work in terms of content,” Grütters said on Friday. Schäfer’s deputy, Martin Michaelis, will assume responsibility for running the museum until a successor can be hired.

B’nai B’rith International president Charles O. Kaufman, who sent a letter last week to Schäfer about the museum’s anti-Israel direction, told the Post on Friday: “What’s crucial now is for the museum to identify leadership that commits to professionalism and the truth of sharing the long and rich Jewish life of Germany. This museum must earn the name Jewish Museum and, in doing so, earn the trust of the country, Europe and all visitors from around the world. It must not immerse itself in politicizing history, stooping to propaganda and, worse, revisionism.”

British journalist Tom Gross was invited to tour the museum by Schäfer’s office last year and expressed his dismay afterwards at some of the anti-Israel political aspects he saw.

“The important thing now, since the museum is currently replacing its permanent exhibit, due to reopen next year, is to make sure Schäfer’s replacement is someone who is more interested in remembering the enormous contributions of Berlin’s Jews to German and world history, and in accurately explaining the sheer sadistic horrors of the Holocaust, rather than engage in anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, extreme left-wing posturing,” Gross told the Post.