ISRAEL Comments turned off

Take the Palestinians’ ‘No’ for an Answer They’ve rejected every peace initiative. Their no-show this week in Bahrain should be the last. By Eugene Kontorovich

Posted By on June 24th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/take-the-palestinians-no-for-an-answer-11561316980

This week’s U.S.-led Peace to Prosperity conference in Bahrain on the Palestinian economy will likely be attended by seven Arab states—a clear rebuke to foreign-policy experts who said that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the Golan Heights as Israeli territory would alienate the Arab world. Sunni Arab states are lending legitimacy to the Trump administration’s plan, making it all the more notable that the Palestinian Authority itself refuses to participate.

The conference’s only agenda is improving the Palestinian economy. It isn’t tied to any diplomatic package, and the plan’s 40-page overview contains nothing at odds with the Palestinian’s purported diplomatic goals. Some aspects are even politically uncomfortable for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Given all that, the Palestinian Authority’s unwillingness to discuss economic opportunities for its own people, even with the Arab states, shows how far it is from discussing the concessions necessary for a diplomatic settlement. Instead it seeks to deepen Palestinian misfortune and use it as a cudgel against Israel in the theater of international opinion.

This isn’t the first time the Palestinians have said no. At a summit brokered by President Clinton in 2000, Israel offered them full statehood on territory that included roughly 92% of the West Bank and all of Gaza, along with a capital in Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority rejected that offer, leading Israel to up it to 97% of the West Bank in 2001. Again, the answer was no. An even further-reaching offer in 2008 was rejected out of hand. And when President Obama pressured Israel into a 10-month settlement freeze in 2009 to renew negotiations, the Palestinians refused to come to the table.

After so many rejections, one might conclude that the Palestinian Authority’s leaders simply aren’t interested in peace. Had they accepted any of the peace offers, they would have immediately received the rarest of all geopolitical prizes: a new country, with full international recognition. To be sure, in each proposal they found something not quite to their liking. But the Palestinians are perhaps the only national independence movement in the modern era that has ever rejected a genuine offer of internationally recognized statehood, even if it falls short of all the territory the movement had sought.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Elizabeth Warren Demands Reparations for Same-Sex Couples By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on June 24th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/elizabeth-warren-demands-reparations-for-same-sex-couples/

True to form on the intersectionality front, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, introduced a bill to extend the idea of reparations to LGBT people. While far more limited in scope than frequent calls for slavery reparations to black Americans, the proposal blames the U.S. government for withholding benefits same-sex couples allegedly should have received before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

On Friday, Warren re-introduced S. 1940, the Refund Equality Act, which would allow same-sex couples to amend past tax returns. According to a report from the Joint Committee on Taxation, the bill would direct $57 million in refunds. The funds would go to same-sex couples in states that had legalized same-sex marriage before the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013. Warren introduced an earlier version of the bill in 2017.

“The federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade,” Warren said in a statement on the legislation. “We need to call out that discrimination and to make it right — Congress should pass the Refund Equality Act immediately.”

“It wasn’t until marriage equality became law that gay & lesbian couples could jointly file tax returns—so they paid more in taxes,” Warren tweeted Saturday.

“Our government owes them more than $50M for the years our discriminatory tax code left them out. We must right these wrongs.”Such claims echo the argument for slavery reparations. According to that argument, the government allowed and fostered the horrific practice of race-based slavery, which stripped black people of their right to the fruits of their own labor. While slavery was abolished, the government did not return the property unjustly stolen from black people. The wealth inequalities among black and white Americans are a result of this horrific injustice, so the argument goes. Therefore, the government must pay their descendants the debt it owes them.

POLITICS Comments turned off

New Documents Released Regarding Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Possible Bigamy and Incest By Rick Moran

Posted By on June 23rd, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-documents-released-regarding-rep-ilhan-omars-possible-bigamy-and-incest/

The Minnesota Campaign Fiance Board has released new documents in the case of campaign finance violations against Rep. Ilhan Omar which shed a little more light on charges made during her 2018 campaign that she married her brother, a British citizen, so he could enter the United States, but then married another man in 2017 before divorcing her first husband.

An investigation by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune revealed that Omar legally corrected the error, but questions surrounding her relationship with her first husband persist.

In August of 2016, the original story broke when Powerline blog covered it:

A reader has written us to point out that the Somali website  Somalispotposted information last week suggesting Omar’s involvement in marriage and immigration fraud. The post notes that Omar married Ahmed Hirsi in 2002. Hirsi is the father of Omar’s three children. Omar is depicted with Hirsi and their children on Omar’s campaign website  here.

The post further notes that Omar married her brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, implying that the latter marriage assisted his entry into the United States. Her brother was a British citizen. “As soon as Ilhan Omar married him,” the post continues, “he started university at her [a]lma mater North Dakota State University where he graduated in 2012. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Minneapolis where he was living in a public housing complex and was later evicted. He then returned to the United Kingdom where he now lives.”

The Star investigation tried to untangle the convoluted skein of Omar’s personal life:

Omar has denied the allegations in the past, dismissing them as “baseless rumors” first raised in an online Somali politics forum and championed by conservative bloggers during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota House. But she said little then or since about Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the former husband who swept into her life in 2009 before a 2011 separation.

EDUCATION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Jordan Peterson: Gender politics has no place in the classroom A six-year-old girl became confused about her identity after an Ottawa teacher taught her class that ‘girls are not real and boys are not real’

Posted By on June 23rd, 2019

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-gender-politics-has-no-place-in-the-classroom

Back in September of 2016, I released three videos, expressing my concern about Bill C-16, which was then under consideration by the federal government, following the passage of similar legislation in a number of provinces. C-16 purported to merely add “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. However, it was embedded in a web of policy, much of it created by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which indicated that the bill comprised the tip of a very large iceberg. I was particularly upset with the insistence that failure to use the “preferred pronouns” chosen by individuals whose gender-related identity did not fit neatly, according to their personal judgement, into the standard categories of boy and girl or man and woman would now become an offence punishable by law.

Worse is the insistence characteristic of the bill, the policies associated with it, and the tenth-rate academic dogmas driving the entire charade, that “identity” is something solely determined by the individual in question (whatever that identity might be). Even sociologists (neither the older, classical, occasionally useful type, nor the modern, appalling, and positively counterproductive type) don’t believe this. They understand that identity is a social role, which means that it is by necessity socially negotiated. And there’s a reason for this. An identity — a role — is not merely what you think you are, moment to moment, or year by year, but, as the Encyclopedia Britannica has it (specifically within its sociology section), “a comprehensive pattern of behavior that is socially recognized, providing a means of identifying and placing an individual in society,” also serving “as a strategy for coping with recurrent situations and dealing with the roles of others (e.g., parent-child roles).”

Your identity is not the clothes you wear, or the fashionable sexual preference or behaviour you adopt and flaunt, or the causes driving your activism, or your moral outrage at ideas that differ from yours: properly understood, it’s a set of complex compromises between the individual and society as to how the former and the latter might mutually support one another in a sustainable, long-term manner. It’s nothing to alter lightly, as such compromise is very difficult to attain, constituting as it does the essence of civilization itself, which took eons to establish, and understanding, as we should, that the alternative to the adoption of socially-acceptable roles is conflict — plain, simple and continual, as well as simultaneously psychological and social.

To the degree that identity is not biological (and much, but not all of it is), then it’s a drama enacted in the world of other people. An identity provides rules for social interactions that everyone understands; it provides generic but vitally necessary direction and purpose in life. If you’re a child, and you’re playing a pretend game with your friends, you negotiate your identity, so the game can be properly played. You do the same in the real world, whether you are a child, an adolescent, or an adult. To refuse to engage in the social aspect of identity negotiation — to insist that what you say you are is what everyone must accept — is simply to confuse yourself and everyone else (as no one at all understands the rules of your game, not least because they have not yet been formulated).

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran: New Terrorist Activity in Europe by Con Coughlin

Posted By on June 23rd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14409/iran-terrorism-europe

One of the more disturbing discoveries regarding Iran’s ever-expanding terrorism horizons has emerged in London where it was revealed by the Daily Telegraph earlier this month that a terrorist cell with links to Iran had been caught stockpiling tonnes of explosive materials on the outskirts of London at a secret bomb factory.

British intelligence officials have now concluded the stockpile was part of an international Hizbollah plot to lay the foundations for future terror attacks in Europe.

One positive outcome from Iran’s increased terrorist activity has been to persuade the British government finally to designate the entire Hizbollah organisation as a terrorist organisation.

Now, with Iran being held responsible for the latest escalation in tensions in the Gulf, Britain and other European powers should demonstrate their resolve to oppose Iran’s well-documented sponsorship of terrorism by backing the Trump administration in its latest confrontation with the ayatollahs.

Iran is intensifying its efforts to build a global terror network as the ayatollahs come under increasing economic and political pressure resulting from US sanctions.

While US officials continue to investigate Iran’s involvement in the recent series of attacks on a number of oil tankers operating in the Gulf, counter-terrorism experts have uncovered evidence that Iran is also working hard to develop its terrorist infrastructure well beyond the confines of the Middle East.

Intelligence officials are particularly concerned about Iran’s activities in Europe where they have identified a recent upsurge in Iranian-sponsored terrorist activity.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Pelosi Continues to Deflect the Censure Gambit By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on June 23rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/nancy-pelosi-president-trump-censure-impeachment/

The House speaker is playing the long game.

O ne-quarter of House Democrats publicly support impeaching President Trump. It is an oft-reported talking point in media-Democrat circles. Not much mentioned is the corollary: That means three-quarters would rather see the question go away.

This is the challenge that Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to navigate — deftly.

When last we visited this issue, the speaker was deflecting impeachment chatter by insisting that she would prefer to see the president prosecuted and sent to prison.

Now the latest: Pelosi is deflecting censure chatter by insisting that she’d rather see the president impeached.

It is a delicate dance.

As we have noted, only about one-third of the country, mostly Democrats, is interested in pursuing impeachment. The number that sticks with me is 37. That is the rough percentage of people who show up in poll after poll as strongly disapproving of the president and his policies.

I am no psephologist, but that seems like a very high number to me. At any given time, even when things are going well, the total number of people who disapprove is apt to be a good deal higher than those who strongly disapprove. So, if the latter is at 37, the likelihood is that the president will be underwater most, if not all, of the time. (As this is written, the RCP average has him down about 9 percent — 44 approve versus 53 disapprove.)

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Suicide of France by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on June 23rd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14406/suicide-of-france

“Frenchness” is disappearing and being replaced by a kind balkanization of enclaves not communicating with one another…. this is not a good recipe.

The more the French élites with their disposable incomes and cultural leisure cloister themselves in their enclaves, the less likely it is that they will understand the everyday impact of failed mass immigration and multiculturalism.

The globalized, “bobo-ized [bourgeois Bohemian] upper classes” are filling the “new citadels” — as in Medieval France — and are voting en masse for Macron. They have developed “a single way of talking and thinking… that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of a nation subject to severe stress and strain the fable of a kind and welcoming society.” — Christophe Guilluy, Twilight of the Elites, Yale University Press, 2019.

“Regarding France in 2019, it can no longer be denied that a momentous and hazardous transformation, a ‘Great Switch’, is in the making”, observed the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, Michel Gurfinkiel. He was mourning “the passing of France as a distinct country, or at least as the Western, Judeo-Christian nation it had hitherto been presumed to be”. A recent cover story in the weekly Le Point called it “the great upheaval”.

Switch or upheaval, the days of France as we knew it are numbered: the society has lost its cultural center of gravity: the old way of life is fading and close to “extinction”. “Frenchness” is disappearing and being replaced by a kind balkanization of enclaves not communicating with one another. For the country most affected by Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, this is not a good recipe.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK: A Clash of Educations by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on June 23rd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14415/britain-education-clash

While Britons are striving to promote British values, those increasingly appear not to be the values everyone here wants.

The No Outsiders curriculum… teaches acceptance of people different from oneself, which is what brings pupils into contact with mutual respect for Christians, Muslims and Jews, the disabled, gays and everyone who might be considered “other”. “It should make absolutely clear that no group should be left out….”

There seems to be a broader agenda at work here: that is, to find ways in which to maintain British values when faced with people who in many instances seem to oppose them. One example might be a lesson summed up in the Anderton Park expressions about British values…: “Jewish people are equal to Sikhs, Muslims, Christians and people with no religion.” Many might not agree to that sentiment, whether in primary or secondary education, and possibly many Muslim parents would wish their children not to be taught it….

The importance of teaching children about respect for other people cannot be exaggerated. In the light of this, can there be any question that the lessons at Anderton Park school are vital for the West?

What started as a small protest in the UK has taken on wider dimensions that are already spreading to other cities. For more than two months now, a primary school in Birmingham in the UK has been at the centre of a standoff between modern Western values and the concerns of a large group of Muslim parents. As early as April, reports said, leafleters were targeting schools in Birmingham, Manchester, Oldham, London, Blackburn and Bradford.

The almost daily protests outside the schools, although on a more muted scale, are the biggest since those against Salman Rushdie and his book, The Satanic Verses back in 1988 — events that for some radicalized a generation. According to the author Kenan Malik, those early protests sowed the seeds of rifts that have since become wider. Some form of clash between these two sets of values is taking place again.

Anderton Park Primary School is an outstanding place of education for children between the ages of five and eleven. Most of the children are Muslims, but that does not restrict the efforts to introduce them to being fully educated citizens in the country where most were born.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Humanitarian Hoax of “Neutral” Google Searches: Killing America With Kindness – hoax 33 by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on June 23rd, 2019

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22837/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-neutral-google-searches

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

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.

The humanitarian hoax of neutral Google searches is a dangerous example of destruction presented as altruism.

Google is an American multinational technology company that specializes in internet-related services and products including online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware. Google’s revenues in 2018 were a whopping $75 billion, and its market capitalization a staggering $791 billion – just behind Amazon’s market capitalization of $802 billion.

Google is currently the nation’s premier web-based information outlet with 63,000 searches per second, 3.8 million per minute, and 5.8 billion searches a day. So, what is the problem?

Google has reversed its lofty 1998 foundational mission, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Making information universally accessible and useful describes a free and open Internet that is diametrically opposed to censorship, curating content, and algorithms for social engineering the masses.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Sydney Williams: The Liberal World Order

Posted By on June 23rd, 2019

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

The liberal world order grew from the ashes of World War II, a war that killed almost four percent of the world’s population – that is one out of every twenty-five people. Look at your town, city, street or apartment building and consider the human cost! It is no surprise that Western leaders wanted to ensure that no such atrocity happened again. It was the United States that exited the War in a position of global strength, and thus became the guarantor of security and the principal provider of funds necessary to rebuild both its allies and its enemies. The U.S., in 1945 had about 50% of the world’s wealth, with only 6.5% of its population. Militarily, the U.S. was peerless and, until 1949, the only country with an Atomic weapon.

The liberal order was committed to democratic ideals and the free movements of goods and people. It was organized around nation states. The result has been seventy years of unprecedented prosperity. And, while genocides in subsequent years were experienced in Cambodia and Rwanda, Europe and Japan remained at peace. To help enforce that liberal order, supranational organizations were built, like the United Nations, NATO and the World Bank. However, because of transnational governance, those institutions threatened to override the laws of the sovereign states they were charged to uphold. As well, the impulse to impose progressive norms on all nations was a natural consequence of these organizations. They interfered with internal affairs, when autocracies threatened, and they spread progressive ideas, without regard to a country’s customs and traditions. As well, well-intentioned Presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush wanted to transform autocratic regimes into democratic ones, with the former’s National Endowment for Democracy and the latter’s “freedom agenda” – a task that proved insurmountable.  

As early as February 1948, George Kennan said we must avoid “sentimentality” and deal in “straight power concepts” – a role played by the United States’ military, which was not always welcomed. In the same memo, Mr. Kennan was emphatically realistic: “We should cease to talk about such vague and unreal objectives as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization.” Yet the reach of humanitarian groups within the United Nations has expanded: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nation Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the United Nations Department of Global Communications, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and UNICEF. These NGOs employ tens of thousands of people, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, with the U.S. being the principal benefactor. While purporting to further the “liberal order,” they, in fact, undermine it, at least according to the dictates of Mr. Kennan. Brock Chisholm, a Canadian and first Director- General of the World Health Organization and who died in 1971 was blunt: “To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas” – an Orwellian concept, the beginnings of which we see in Brussels today and in the words and deeds of those who put supranational organizations and treaties above the nation state.