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The War on Common Sense Robert Curry *****

Posted By on September 15th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/14/the-war-on-common-sense/

Faltering belief in common sense is behind the rejection of the Founders’ idea of America. More broadly, it is behind the astonishing rejection of Western civilization by its own people.

When Thomas Paine appealed to “common sense” to make the case for American independence, it probably never crossed his mind that there would ever be a need to make the case for common sense itself, at least not in America. But common-sense thinking has fallen out of favor. Because it has been under attack for a very long time, it no longer gets the respect it once commanded. Deep thinkers have discarded it, elites have learned to disdain it, and many of us have had our confidence in its value badly shaken.

The consequences are enormous. Faltering belief in common sense is behind the rejection of the Founders’ idea of America. More broadly, it is behind the astonishing rejection of Western civilization by its own people—a rejection that has reached what looks to be a civilization-ending crisis in Europe.

Examples of the war on common sense are now everywhere in public life. How about the denial of the plain fact that humans are either male or female?

Not long ago, a boy in a tutu and a tiara who claimed he was a girl would still be regarded as a boy. Today, academic and cultural elites, as well as government officials, insist that “gender identity” is more real than biology. They say there are many genders, and one website tells me there are 63. Elites tell us we had better get with the many-gender program, or else. And while we are at it, we had better get politically correct about marriage. We are told that marriage no longer means one thing, a union between a man and a woman. How long will it be until we have 63 varieties of marriage?

The war on moral common sense has reached new heights of absurdity. If we point out a need for common-sense steps to protect ourselves from Islamic terrorists, we are said to suffer a psychological condition called “Islamophobia.” But unlike other phobias, such as claustrophobia, this condition is said to make us victimizers rather than victims. Similarly, if we say that America needs to secure its borders, we are met by cries that “walls are immoral.” Evidently, the common-sense wisdom that good walls make good neighbors has been taken down by the masters of political correctness.

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TARGET NEW YORK: JUDITH MILLER

Posted By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/islamist-terror-threat

Eighteen years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, many Americans believe that the threat of Islamist terror is played out—but that’s only because our counterterrorism efforts have been so successful. Attempted terror attacks no longer make front-page headlines, but the list of foiled plots to kill American citizens is long and chilling. This past summer saw arrests of potential terrorists who would have killed dozens or hundreds of people if successful. On September 3, for example, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, also known as Suleiman Al-Amriki, with providing material support to ISIS. Asainov is accused of having been an ISIS sniper and weapons instructor. A naturalized U.S. citizen (he was born in Kazakhstan) who lived in Brooklyn for nearly 15 years, Asainov traveled in late 2013 to Istanbul, a common entry point to Syria. There, he joined ISIS and rose through the ranks to become an “emir” in charge of weapons training. He tried to recruit other Americans to fight for ISIS in Syria. Asainov messaged a government informant, exclaiming in reference to ISIS, “We are the worst terrorist organization in the world that has ever existed!” He still yearned to die on the battlefield for jihad, Asainov told the informant.

Last month, Awais Chudhary was charged with plotting to stab New Yorkers in Queens. A 19-year-old American citizen born in Pakistan and raised in a middle-class neighborhood, Chudhary planned to attack pedestrians on a bridge over the Grand Central Parkway to the Flushing Bay Promenade or at the World’s Fair Marina, both of which he had visited repeatedly to scout where he could kill the most people. He planned to record his attack to inspire others. He intended to use a knife, he told an agent, unless the agent could show him how to bomb a “mini-bridge over a busy road with many cars.” He was arrested en route to retrieve items he had ordered online for the assault—a tactical knife, a mask, gloves, and a cellphone with a chest and head strap to enable him to record his slaughter hands-free. 

Also last month, prosecutors charged two women from Queens with planning to build bombs similar to those used in earlier terrorist attacks. Asia Siddiqui and Noelle Velentzas, both U.S. citizens and Queens residents, pleaded guilty to distributing information about how to make and use explosive devices and weapons of mass destruction. Between 2013 and 2015, the complaint states, they planned to build a bomb themselves, teaching each other chemistry and the electrical skills needed to create and detonate a deadly device. They also explored how to make plastic explosives and assemble a car bomb, bought and stored in their homes materials required for an explosive device—including  propane gas tanks, soldering tools, car-bomb instructions, machetes, and several knives—and discussed similar devices used in past terrorist incidents, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. They researched potential targets, focusing on law enforcement and military installations. Velentzas favored attacks on government targets. In terrorist attacks, she said, “You go for the head.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Black Lives Matter Comes to the Classroom Activists bring the movement’s spirit and ideology into a growing number of secondary and even elementary schools. Peter C. Myers

Posted By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/black-lives-matter-in-the-classroom

Black Lives Matter, though less prominent in the headlines of late, continues to be quite a growth story. What began in 2013 as a hashtag propagated by a few activists and academics rapidly grew into a nationwide protest movement and then into an institutional establishment, with local chapters around the U.S. and even a few abroad. With lavish funding and generally supportive media attention, the BLM network has become the progressive Left’s primary organ of antiracism activism. Now it seeks to sustain and expand upon that success. In its most ambitious venture yet, the group has moved beyond the streets and into the nation’s public schools.

No one should be surprised. As BLM statements repeatedly make clear, the movement has always linked the charges of police misconduct that brought it into existence with a comprehensive critique of the American polity. “State violence” against blacks “takes many forms,” the BLM network’s “About us” statement declares. The first plank of a widely publicized platform issued in 2016 demands “an immediate end to the criminalization and dehumanization of Black youth,” including “an end to zero-tolerance school policies and arrests of students, the removal of police from schools, and the reallocation of funds from police and punitive school discipline practices to restorative services.” BLM founder Opal Tometi heads the list of signatories of a 2018 letter urging teachers to support a “new uprising for racial justice” in the nation’s schools.

Neither Tometi nor BLM’s other two founders, however, initiated the latest campaign. In keeping with activists’ pride in their network’s decentralization—a self-conscious departure from the top-down organizational model that they ascribe to the civil rights movement—the present venture is akin to a franchising operation, with local cells of teachers’ union activists as the operators. K–12 educators sympathetic with the movement have successfully promoted the “Black Lives Matter at School” program, bringing its activist spirit and ideology into a growing number of secondary and even elementary classrooms.

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Russia: Dreaming of a Return to the West by Amir Taheri

Posted By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14882/russia-solvophilia-occidentalists

Russia may be talking in Slavophile tones but deep in its heart, desires to be readmitted into the Western camp. This is seen in the way Russians dress, the kind of food they eat, the beverages they drink, the music they listen to, the TV shows and the films they watch, and the books they read. Queues in front of McDonald’s joints may be a vulgar sign of creeping Westernization.

The results of this month’s municipal elections, declared last week, show a clear setback for Putinism in its Slavophile version. The president’s United Russia party lost more than a third of its seats in Moscow that, as in other metro-centric countries, has set the tone for national politics at least since the 1920s.

Putin wants to fool the Western democracies into helping negotiate a bad patch before he returns to his old shenanigans. President Macron’s call for reintegrating Russia into the G7 summit last month was dismissed by other participants even before it made it onto the agenda.

If every nation, like every language, has its grammar, what is the grammar that might help us understand Russia today?

Even the least observant foreign visitors to Russia these days are likely quickly to discover the first rule of that metaphorical grammar: the unity of opposites. On one side, we have a Russia that is attached almost obsessively to its “otherness”. On the other, we have a Russia that craves after “sameness” as a member of the family of Western nations.

This “otherness-sameness” duality is not new in Russian history.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

A “Guide” to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by the United Church of Christ by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13563/ucc-israel-palestinian-conflict-guide

Titled, “Promoting a Just Peace in Palestine-Israel”, and sub-headed “A Guide for United Church of Christ Faith Leaders”, this toxic document is a desperately one-sided, inaccurate, and counter-factual exercise in futile politics.

There is no room in it for a Jewish, Israeli or moderate Christian voice; just hatred of Israel and defence of the Palestinians who, time after time, have turned down generous offers of peace. The naïvety of the UCC is particularly striking in its choice to take at face value the Palestinian statement that if Israel ended its occupation, “Then they will see a new world in which there is no fear, no threat but rather security, justice and peace.” That is simply bunkum. Sadly, the Palestinians have a history of regarding every goodwill gesture by Israel as a retreat, as the triumph of aggression over diplomacy — as if to say: We shoot at Israelis and they leave; so, let’s keep shooting!

Palestinian terrorism against Israelis has continued up to 1967, right through the period of Israeli non-occupation. There were no “settlements” then. Rather, the Palestinians have always regarded all of Israel as one big “settlement”. Just look at any Palestinian maps; they cover both the entirety of Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The UCC boasts that it is “a just peace church”, but instead of supporting peace and justice, it defends mass murderers. It complains about the defensive actions of the Jews but is knowingly silent about the horrors wrought by Palestinian wars and terrorism.

Welcome to yet another skewed guide on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. After a vote to support boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel in 2015, an organization affiliated with the UCC, the UCC Palestine Israel Network (UCCPIN), published a guide to Israel-Palestine affairs. Titled, “Promoting a Just Peace in Palestine-Israel,” and sub-headed “A Guide for United Church of Christ Faith Leaders”, this toxic document is a desperately one-sided, inaccurate, and counter-factual exercise in futile politics. Legally, UCCPIN operates under the aegis of one of the denomination’s local conferences. Its Guide is, therefore, not the direct work of the church’s leadership, but is clearly endorsed by a section of it.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Can mainstream conservatism survive in the 21st century? By Taylor Lewis

Posted By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/can_mainstream_conservatism_survive_in_the_21st_century.html

Is it authoritarianism to ban Drag Queen Story Hour in public libraries, with the explicit threat of violent prosecution?

That’s the question at the heart of the recent debate between author Sohrab Ahmari and National Review’s David French.  Moderated by columnist Ross Douthat at Catholic University, the disputation was the first public confrontation of fusion conservatism and a burgeoning but inchoate mix of nationalism and integralism.

The contest of ideas, sad to say, wasn’t an even-sided scrimmage.  The mainstream conservative side, represented by the hail-fellow-well-met writer David French, was dominant, aided by French’s attorney background and jujitsu-style argumentation.  Ahmari ping-ponged between decrying proceduralism’s fecklessness and offering his own thin-soupy proceduralist solutions.

For example, when pressed on how he’d combat crossdressers reading children stories in taxpayer-funded libraries, flaunting their sexual depravities, Ahmari could only recommend a congressional hearing and proscription via local ordinance.  Not exactly the Battle of Lepanto.

Ahmari lost the verbal battle, but the war over a proper right-wing philosophy in tune with the greater good continues.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Sahar: The ‘Blue Girl’ of Iran, struck down By Amil Imani

Posted By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/sahar_the_blue_girl_of_iran_struck_down.html

Like Neda, a young woman whose chest was ripped up by the bullet of a murdering Islamist as she peacefully walked with a throng of peaceful demonstrators, Sahar’s tragedy gives us a glimpse of the true face of Islamofascism and its brutality inside Iran.  The Sahars and Nedas of Iran shall remain as an eternal testament to the depravity of Islamofascism and the horrors it has visited upon innocent people.  And these young victims of the Islamic tyranny are by no means isolated cases.  Tragically, women as a sex suffer incredibly under Islam.  Women are systematically exploited, maltreated, and disenfranchised.

Twenty-nine-year-old Sahar Khodayari died several days after setting herself on fire on September 2, 2019 outside a courthouse, where she had been summoned after being arrested for trying to enter Tehran’s Azadi Stadium in March dressed as a man.

Her nickname was the “Blue Girl” because of her favorite team’s color, which is blue, the famous Tehran club Esteghlal or former Taj.  She was reportedly told she could be sentenced to six months in prison.

As soon as this brutal Islamic regime took the power in 1979 in an Islamic invasion, it directed its efforts to cleanse Iran of the symbol of its Persian cultural heritage.  The Muslims particularly went after women.  Sharia law was implemented.  The Blue Girl’s only “offense” was being a woman in a country where women face discrimination that is established in law and plays out in the most appalling ways imaginable in every area of their lives, and even in sports.

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The Impeachment Motions: Jerry Nadler deserves an Oscar for pretending his probe is serious.

Posted By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-impeachment-motions-11568416067

Democratic presidential candidates issued a gusher of words over three hours Thursday night, but one they didn’t utter was “impeachment.” That was no accident. The polls show the cause is a political loser, and maybe someone should tell Jerrold Nadler.

The House Judiciary Chairman is still trying to persuade voters that he has Donald Trump in his impeachment sights. Russian collusion wasn’t real, obstruction of justice didn’t fly, and payments to Stormy Daniels sound too much like lying about sex (and Bill Clinton ). So now Mr. Nadler is back to the old stand of arguing that Mr. Trump is enriching himself while in office.

This isn’t likely to go anywhere either, but it’s worth parsing the latest accusations to explain why. Democrats are investigating whether the Defense Department has been propping up struggling Glasgow Prestwick airport in Scotland to help the nearby Trump Turnberry golf resort. In a letter to then Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings noted the Pentagon has bought $11 million of fuel from Prestwick since October 2017. He also demanded details about a few Air Force crew members who stayed at Turnberry on a stopover this year.

The Prestwick airport, which is owned by the Scottish government, is struggling and its presence helps the Trump resort. But the Pentagon signed its contract with Prestwick in October 2016—before Mr. Trump was elected. Maybe Mr. Nadler should call Barack Obama as a witness.

As for the Turnberry stopover, the Air Force says seven active-duty and National Guard members stayed at the Trump resort on the way to Kuwait but stayed at a Marriott on the way back. The Air Force says the crew made its reservation through a defense travel system and used the “closest available” and “least expensive” accommodations to the airfield; the Trump resort was cheaper than the Marriott; and both properties were under the per diem travel rate of $166 a night. The Air Force says crews have stayed in the area 659 times over the past four years, and only 6% went to Turnberry.

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Sorry Dems, The Air Force Deal To Refuel Near Trump’s Scottish Resort Was Made Under Obama By Matt Margolis

Posted By on September 15th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/sorry-dems-the-air-force-deal-to-refuel-near-trumps-scottish-resort-was-made-under-obama/

In April, the House Oversight Committee began investigating why an Air National Guard crew flying back and from to and from Kuwait stopped at Trump’s Turnberry resort near Glasgow, Scotland. House Democrats were quick to accuse Trump of financially benefitting off the military. Why not? Russian collusion is dead, and they aren’t exactly having more luck on the obstruction charges. So, bring it on! Another scandal to throw at Donald Trump in an attempt to tarnish his presidency.

Looks like Democrats have another swing and a miss on this latest attempt of brewing up a Trump scandal because the arrangement between the United States Air Force and the airport near the resort was signed during the Obama administration.

The U.S. Air Force has lodged crews at President Donald Trump’s Scotland resort up to 40 times since 2015, a figure that is far higher than previously known.

The tally represents the preliminary results of an Air Force review launched after POLITICO reported last week that an Air National Guard crew stayed at Turnberry in March. Congressional Democrats have also been investigating military stays at the property, but have yet to receive any information from the Pentagon.

The figure does not indicate how many of the stays have occurred since Trump became president. But the Air Force has significantly ramped up its overnight stops in Scotland under Trump after signing a contract with the Prestwick Airport — situated 20-plus miles from Turnberry — in the waning months of the Obama administration. Since 2015, the service has lodged crews in the area 659 times, meaning up to 6 percent of those stays were at Turnberry.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

CAROLINE GLICK: ISRAEL AND JOHN BOLTON’S DEPARTURE

Posted By on September 15th, 2019

http://carolineglick.com/israel-and-john-boltons-departure/

US National Security Advisor John Bolton’s departure from the White House has been the source of considerable concern in Israel. For decades, the veteran diplomat and former UN ambassador has been among the most powerful supporters of a strong US-Israel alliance in Washington. During his tenure as President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, Bolton worked steadily on expanding US-Israel strategic ties across a wide spectrum of critical issues from Iran, to the Palestinians and beyond.

Israelis would have greeted the departure of their strong ally and friend with concern regardless of the circumstances. But, the fact that he was fired, (or by Bolton’s telling, felt compelled to resign), just days after Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s envoy for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians resigned from his position and as reports proliferate that Trump is seriously considering reducing economic sanctions on Iran in the hopes of scoring a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the UN General Assembly later this month, intensified the concern.

Although reasonable on their face, Bolton’s termination needs to be seen in two wider contexts. The first context is the environment in Washington that confronted Bolton in his position.

From the day he took up his duties a year and a half ago as Trump’s third national security advisor, Bolton was under assault. The campaign against Bolton was initiated by the Iranian regime. Iranian Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif blamed poor US-Iran relations on Bolton, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. Zarif’s campaign was quickly joined by Obama administration officials who took to the US media parroting the same allegations. The Iranians, by their telling were guileless lambs. The big bad wolves were Bolton, Bibi and bin Salman.