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Iran’s Options and the Destructive Defiance by Amir Taheri

Posted By on May 26th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14269/iran-options-defiance

To start with, we must realize that the crisis in question isn’t caused by any of the traditional causes of conflict between nation-states…. In other words, the conflict isn’t a classical international one. The reason is that Iran no longer behaves as a nation-state but as a vehicle for an ideology.

The madness that is Khomeinism has always had its method, which includes abject surrender when pressed too hard and brazen aggression when pressure is eased.

Contrary to claims by the pro-mullah lobby in Washington, the choice isn’t between surrender to Khomeminist madness and full-scale invasion of Iran. Only when the threshold of tolerable pain is reached the “Supreme Guide” may well reconsider his options. We are not there yet.

According to an old adage, every crisis also contains an opportunity. And the current crisis between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States may be no exception. Intense sabre-rattling on both sides, combined with what one might call “diplomacy of gesticulations,” have reignited interest in what was a half-dormant conflict. That renewed interest could be used for persuading both sides, and others interested in the “Iran problem”, to re-visit the root causes of the conflict. And, having done so, try to find realistic ways of defusing the situation.

But before that could be done, a number of steps must be taken.

To start with, we must realize that the crisis in question isn’t caused by any of the traditional causes of conflict between nation-states. Iran and the US do not have a border problem, they are not fighting over access to natural resources and do not seek to snatch market share from one another. Nor are they in conflict over the oppression of one side’s kith-and-kin by the other. The two are not fighting over water resources, access to open seas or calculations about national security.

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Let’s Call the Russian Collusion ‘Hoax’ What it Really Is By Roger Kimball

Posted By on May 26th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/25/lets-call-the-russian-collusion-hoax-what-it-really-is/

During the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai in 1932, the Austrian essayist Karl Kraus was anguishing over the placement of commas in a column. It might seem futile at such a moment, he told a friend, but “if those who are obliged to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.”

Hyperbolic? Perhaps. But the general point holds: words matter, as do the their appurtenances, punctuation. (After all, “Let’s eat Grandma” means something quite different from “Let’s eat, Grandma.”)

George Orwell made a kindred observation about the importance of having the courage to call things by their real names. Euphemism, the counterfeit of good manners, is the enemy of truth, which is the only ally worth having.

I have been thinking about this constellation of ideas recently as the news has been full of talk about the “Russian collusion hoax.” Use of the term “hoax” got a big boost in the aftermath of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the question of whether there was actionable cooperation, coordination, or collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Two years, $34 million, and a wide swath of debilitating rumor, innuendo, and unrelated indictments and prosecutions later and we know that the answer to that question is “No, there was no cooperation, coordination, or collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Anyway, we know that if we haven’t locked ourselves in the bunker bulwark, closed our eyes, put our fingers in our ears, and chanted continually the NeverTrump mantras.

I myself have deployed the term “hoax” to describe what happened to Donald Trump and his colleagues—and to the American people—during and after the 2016 presidential campaign.

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BUDAPEST’S HOUSE OF TERROR

Posted By on May 25th, 2019

From the New York Times: https://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/a-wonderful-museum-of-terror-in-budapest/

It is a museum dedicated to remembering the terrible things done first by the Nazis and then later by the Soviet-backed Communist Party in this now vibrant democratic country. Housed in a former headquarters of the Communist Secret Police, in the very center of Budapest, it is a fitting site for such memorial.

The House of Terror is a brilliant amalgam of history museum, performance art and touching architectural memorial to all the people — Jews, liberals, intellectuals — who died or suffered under Hungary’s sequential reigns of terror. Their small framed portraits are discreetly displayed on the outside of the building, their names etched in its interior walls.

In a city now known for cafes, rock festivals and indulgent baths one might regard the House of Terror as an unnecessary downer — a reminder of the ugly things that happened in this now hedonistic capital. Why, my teenagers asked me last week, were we wallowing in this uncomfortable history when we could be taking in some of the world’s hippist bands at the Sziget Music Festival or luxuriating in the Gellert baths?

But to me the House of Terror more meditative than depressing: asking us to remember the lessons of history and to contemplate how is it that humans can sometimes be so blind and cruel.

Starting on the top floor you walk room-by-room through Hungary’s recent history, starting with the Nazi invasion of Hungary in the 1940s. The museum makes good use of old newsreels as well as oral histories of people who survived these two eras; the sound in Hungarian, but with English subtitles. (The entire museum has excellent explanations in both Hungarian and English.)

 

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I’d Love to Meet Bernie in Budapest James Allen

Posted By on May 25th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/05/id-love-to-meet-bernie-in-budapest/

Bernie Sanders very nearly won the US Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016, only losing due to Hillary Clinton jiggery-pokery of the party’s rules around ex officio voting entitlements.  But here’s the thing.  What does it tell you about core Democrat voters that so many, probably more than half, would support a self-proclaimed ‘socialist’? Look at young Democrat activists and it was a lot more than half  who supported the long-time socialist Senator from Vermont.

What’s the big deal, you might ask?  Well, I think it boils down to the man’s moral antennae vibrating at such a shocking and illiberal frequency.  Sanders is the man who, in 1988, took his honeymoon in the then USSR. Some footage of the happy couple is below.  Just to remind you, that was before the Berlin Wall came down, the collapse of all of the satellite Soviet regimes and, indeed, of Soviet Russia itself.  New footage of that Sanders’ honeymoon trip has recently come to light, with Bernie sitting near or under portraits of Lenin (a mass-murderer himself, though not in the same league as Stalin, I concede) while praising the virtues of Soviet life.  Was the man completely unaware of the activities of the secret police?  Or did he just think a few eggs have to be broken to make an omelette?

And did you know Sanders was at that time already into his second term as mayor of Vermont’s biggest city, Burlington? Later, he would go on to support the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; to favour a massive warming of relations with Cuba; and to support the revolutionary policies in Venezuela, at least early on.  Let’s put it no more harshly than this: Mr. Sanders is blinded by his own ideology and seems to think that life in a non-Western, non-capitalist country is better than it is in the US.  I believe the scientific word for such beliefs is ‘bonkers’, but correct me if I’m wrong.

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Report: Obama’s Spying On The Press Was Far More Extensive Than Previously Thought: John Merline

Posted By on May 25th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/25/report-obamas-spying-on-the-press-was-far-more-extensive-than-previously-thought/

President Trump might be openly hostile to the mainstream media, but it was the Obama administration that was engaged in a widespread effort to thwart the media. Which do you think is more harmful to a free press?

The full extent of Obama’s actions against the press are only now coming to light.

The Columbia Journalism Review reports on a newly released government document showing that the Obama Justice Department engaged in a far more sweeping effort to spy on the Associated Press than previously believed.

“In 2013, the Justice Department launched a brazen attack on press freedom,” the CJR notes, “issuing sweeping subpoenas for the phone records of The Associated Press and several of its reporters and editors as part of a leak investigation. At the time, the subpoenas were widely seen as a massive intrusion into newsgathering operations. Last month, we learned that they told only part of the story.”

The spying came in the wake of the AP’s reporting on a thwarted Yemen-based bomb plot, which contained classified information about the CIA operation. Months later, the AP learned that the DOJ had vacuumed up two-months of phone records on 21 different lines trying to find the leaker. 

Unprecedented Intrusion

Upon learning this, the AP blasted the Obama Justice Department. AP’s President and CEO Gary Pruitt said the records collected could “reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

Turns out, Pruitt should have been even more outraged. The new report, obtained by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, finds that the DOJ actually collected records on 30 phones. 

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Ex-Muslim: “Swedes will lose Sweden in 50 years”

Posted By on May 25th, 2019

https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/04/ex-muslim-swedes-will-lose-sweden-in-50-years/

Mona Walter is a Somali woman who came to Sweden in the 90’s. In Somalia, she had never been religious, but in Sweden she was more or less forced to go to the mosque and wear a hijab.

After a couple of years she rebelled, left Islam and became an atheist. Eventually she came to believe in Jesus and converted to Christianity.

“For many years I have tried to get the Swedes to understand what the Muslim goal is – to take over your country. The first thing they will do is demand sharia courts, just like in the UK”, she says.
But the mainstream media does not want to listen to Mona Walter. They call her controversial and most Swedes turn away from her message, which they perceive as too frightening, according to the news blog Ingrid and Maria.
“Swedes are so convinced that Swedish laws will always apply in their country. But ask any Englishman if he 30 years ago would have believed that Britain would have legal sharia courts in 2019. No one would have thought it possible.”

“If Sweden recognises Sharia courts the Muslims will have new demands, like permission to rule their own enclaves without interference from the Swedish society. The end goal is for Sharia to rule all of Sweden.”
“If there, perchance, are any blond and blue-eyed Swedes left at that point it doesn’t matter – they will all be behind niqabs and burkas by that time”, Mona states.

“What Muslim politicians want is to change the laws so that Muslims in Sweden get permission to live under Sharia law. They want to rule their own areas without having to obey the secular laws of Sweden.”
“That is the long-term goal and Islam has lots of patience. As they say: “You have the watches, but we have the time””, she continues.

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Science’s Untold Scandal: The Lockstep March of Professional Societies to Promote the Climate Change Scare By Tom Harris and Dr. Jay Lehr

Posted By on May 25th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/sciences-untold-scandal-the-lockstep-march-of-professional-societies-to-promote-the-climate-change-scare/

When we started our careers, it was considered an honor to be a member of professional societies that helped practitioners keep up with the latest developments in their fields through relevant meetings and publications. Senior author Dr. Jay Lehr had the privilege of leading one of these societies long ago.

But things are different now. Whether it be chemistry, physics, geology or engineering, many of the world’s primary professional societies have changed from being paragons of technical virtue to opportunistic groups focused on maximizing their members’ financial gains in support of the climate scare, the world’s greatest science fraud. In particular, they continue to promote the groundless hypothesis that carbon dioxide emitted as a result of mankind’s use of fossil fuels is leading to environmental catastrophe. You have been hearing about it for the past decade and more, with 21 candidates for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in the next election promoting some form of a Green New Deal—a plan to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and replace them with wind and solar power thereby returning society to the lifestyle of the 1880s.

Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, wrote in 1994 that radical greens had taken over the organization after the fall of the Berlin Wall, leaving him no choice but to resign. The takeover of environmental institutions by extremists is now almost complete, the most important of which may be the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). President Donald Trump is aggressively trying to win back the EPA in the best interests of the nation, but it is an uphill battle as the climate cult has also taken control of academia, political parties, and governments themselves.

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Harvard’s Latest Enfeeblement of Liberal Education Peter Berkowitz

Posted By on May 25th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/

Harvard University’s maladroit defenestration of Ronald Sullivan and his wife, Stephanie Robinson, struck a blow against liberal education. Many of Harvard’s own left-liberal luminaries are up in arms. But the university’s disgraceful act can come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention for the last few decades to higher education in general and to Harvard in particular.

On May 11, the Harvard Crimson reported that Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana informed Winthrop House residents by email that morning that he would not renew Sullivan and Robinson — both of whom teach at Harvard Law School and will keep their positions there — as Winthrop faculty deans. The first African Americans to head one of Harvard’s 12 residential houses, Sullivan and Robinson had served in that position for 10 years.

The trouble began in January when Professor Sullivan — faculty director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute and the Harvard Trial Advocacy Workshop — announced that he would serve on the legal team representing film producer Harvey Weinstein, who faces criminal charges of rape and other sexual misconduct (Sullivan left Weinstein’s defense team on Friday, May 10, the day before Dean Khurana made public his decision). Students protested angrily. They claimed that Sullivan caused them to feel unsafe by taking Weinstein as a client. They alleged that Sullivan’s decision was “trauma-inducing.” They demanded his ouster on the grounds that he had rendered himself unfit to lead Winthrop House.

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Rein in politicized judges and their injunctions

Posted By on May 25th, 2019

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/rein-in-politicized-judges-and-their-injunctions

Federal district judges aren’t emperors for the whole United States. Congress and the Supreme Court should both remind them of that reality.

By issuing putatively national injunctions, Attorney General William Barr said in a May 21 speech to the American Law Institute: “One judge can, in effect, cancel the policy with the stroke of the pen. No official in the United States government [rightly] can exercise that kind of nationwide power, with the sole exception of the president. And the Constitution subjects him to nationwide election, among other constitutional checks, as a prerequisite to wielding that power.”

The subject arises because, on issue after issue, liberal district judges have blocked President Trump’s executive orders or rules promulgated by his administration. The most prominent example occurred when Trump ordered an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program. Even though DACA was created out of thin air by an executive memorandum by President Barack Obama, three separate district judges ruled that Trump could not undo it using the same presidential power. All three said their orders apply nationwide.

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Finland: Will the Social Democrats Retain a Pro-Iran Anti-Semitic MP in Its Ranks? by Kenneth Sikorski

Posted By on May 25th, 2019

A few days after the Finnish elections, Hussein Al-Taee, the son of the governor of Najaf in Iraq and a pro-Iranian regime advocate, was exposed for having spent eight years posting anti-Semitic, anti-American and homophobic comments on Facebook… For four of these years, Al-Taee served as an adviser on Middle Eastern affairs to the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), a state-run conflict-resolution firm… currently headed by former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb.

Although Stubb publicly condemned Al-Taee’s hate-filled social media comments… he has not been asked why a pro-Iranian regime advocate was working for CMI in the first place.

In other words, Al-Taee was expressing “embarrassment” about his “prejudices, thoughts and language” — and lying about them — but did not disavow the sentiments.

Failure on the part of the “center-left” Social Democrats to oust Al-Taee would constitute hypocrisy of the highest order, or else a tacit agreement with hateful positions that the MP has not denied espousing.

A political crisis that has been brewing in Finland over the past few weeks sheds light on the ills of the so-called “center left.”

The crisis surrounds Hussein Al-Taee, a new member of parliament from the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which won a narrow victory in the April 14 elections.

A few days after the Finnish elections, Al-Taee, the son of the governor of Najaf in Iraq and a pro-Iranian regime advocate, was exposed for having spent eight years posting anti-Semitic, anti-American and homophobic comments on Facebook. For four of these years, Al-Taee served as an adviser on Middle Eastern affairs to the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), a state-run conflict-resolution firm founded by the former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, and currently headed by former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb.