ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: The Other Peace Deal by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on March 21st, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13931/palestinians-hamas-fatah-repression

Hamas is now accusing the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Fatah of exploiting the economic crisis in the Gaza Strip to call on Palestinians to overthrow the Hamas regime. Fatah, for its part, is accusing the “dark forces” of Hamas of acting on orders from outside parties to establish a separate Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip.

The US administration says it will publish its long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East, known as the “Deal of the Century,” after the general elections in Israel on April 9. Perhaps it would be a good idea if the US administration came up with a plan to make peace between Palestinians and Palestinians before attempting to make peace between the Palestinians and Israel.

What is clear, meanwhile, is that the Fatah and Hamas leaders are more interested in warring with each other than improving the living conditions of their people. The two groups have already rejected the upcoming “Deal of the Century”: for now, that is the only deal they seem ready to make.

Hamas and Fatah, the two major Palestinian parties ruling the Gaza Strip and West Bank respectively, have been at war with each other for the past 12 years. They disagree on many things, but when it comes to repressing and violating the human rights of their people, Hamas and Fatah have proven that they are comrades-in-arms.

In the past week, Fatah has been launching scathing attacks on Hamas for using excessive force to suppress Palestinians protesting economic hardship in the Gaza Strip. Fatah says that hundreds of Palestinians, including political activists and journalists, have been arrested or severely beaten by Hamas security forces.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: Women’s Rights Abuses Widespread and Systematic by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on March 21st, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13911/turkey-women-rights-abuse

“As the largest jailer of journalists in the world, it’s no surprise that Turkey has the most female journalists behind bars… most detained on anti-state charges.” — Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

The new bill, expected to be voted on ahead of the March 31 local elections, aims to lower the age at which sexual relations with a child (under the cover of marriage) is considered a crime from 15-years-old to 12-years-old. If it passes, it will “pardon” the underage-marriage offenses of approximately 10,000 men currently serving prison sentences on sexual-abuse charges.

“Such an amnesty would whitewash… and encourage… illegal ‘marriages’ with children… It would also discourage the victims from appealing to the legal mechanisms and reintroduce the concept of ‘marriage with rape offenders’ into law.” — The “TCK (Turkish Penal Code) 103 Women’s Platform,” an umbrella organization for 157 women’s and LGBT groups.

International Women’s Day kicked off in Istanbul with the murder of a woman by her boyfriend. A few hours later, thousands of mostly female demonstrators participating in the “17th Feminist Night March,” were attacked with pepper spray by riot police attempting to disperse the annual March 8 event, launched in 2003. This year, however, Turkish police had declared the march “unauthorized,” and closed off all streets leading to the avenue on which it was to take place. Scuffles ensued between the police and women who circumvented the barricades.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Springtime for a Terrorist Will the Supreme Court reduce the sentence of terrorist murderer Lee Boyd Malvo?Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on March 21st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273213/springtime-terrorist-lloyd-billingsley

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case of Lee Boyd Malvo, sentenced to life in prison without parole for his role in killing 10 people in Maryland, Virginia and Washington in 2002. Malvo was 17 at the time and his accomplice, John Allen Muhammad, was sentenced to death and executed in 2009.

Muhammad was a member of the Nation of Islam and his “Islam-centric” partner Malvo was a Jamaican who used forged documents to enter the United States. More than 17 years have passed since their terror spree and for many the events have faded from memory, if they were known at all.

In 2002, the Baltimore Sun provided a timeline of the killing spree, noting that, on October 2, “a 55-year-old man becomes the sniper’s first victim when he is killed by a single bullet around 6 p.m. in a grocery parking lot in Montgomery County.” Then, on October 6 “a 13-year-old boy is critically wounded moments after being dropped off at a middle school in Bowie in Prince George’s County.”

In the early going, police thought a single sniper was at work and were baffled how he was able to shoot without detection. As it happened, Muhammad and Malvo had rigged a 1990 Chevrolet Caprice with holes that enabled fire without opening the trunk. They setup near a school and on October 7, 2002 shot 13-year-old Ian Brown who took a .223 round in the chest.

The shooting caused Montgomery County police chief Charles Moose to break down on television. After capture, Lee Boyd Malvo told jail guards he shot Brown to show the authorities the snipers “meant business” and that he had been pleased to see chief Moose cry on television.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Immigration: The Big Lies How the establishment media’s distortion of the truth undermines America. Michael Cutler

Posted By on March 21st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273188/immigration-big-lies-michael-cutler

The Third Reich’s principle of the “Big Lie” involved the frequent repetition of lies so that the lies became perceived as the truth by the masses.

Orwell noted, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”

In this era of “Fake News” those tactics are purposely wielded by “journalists” to mislead Americans.

On March 15, 2019, News Leader, a subsidiary of USA Today, published an infuriating opinion piece, School owes apology for ICE agent talk at Kate Collins Middle: Our View.

While the article noted that the ICE agent was invited to the school and limited his activities to simply addressing the students of that school to explain the mission of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the mere presence of that federal agent was enough to set off the editors who wrote their “hit piece” about the mere presence of an ICE agent at a public school.

The editors of the publication then spewed utter lies and false “facts” to justify their vitriolic attack on the federal agency that is charged with enforcing federal immigration laws.

In fact, the lies began at the beginning of the editorial and were liberally sprinkled throughout that which followed.

Here is the opening salvo they fired against ICE:

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Maine GOP Leader Attacked for Opposing Open Borders Party vice chairman Nick Isgro is under fire for daring to be a conservative. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on March 21st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273229/maine-gop-leader-attacked-opposing-open-borders-matthew-vadum

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that “[t]ravelers with measles continue to bring the disease into the U.S.” So far this year the CDC has confirmed 268 individual cases of measles in 15 states, including three states that border Mexico (Arizona, California, and Texas).Nick Isgro has the facts on his side, but when have facts ever mattered to leftists and open-borders fanatics?”

The vice chairman of the Maine Republican Party, Nick Isgro, is under fire for inveighing against open borders and the health problems that unvaccinated migrants from Third World countries are bringing with them to America.

This blowback against Isgro is part of the Left’s ongoing effort to stigmatize conservatives by presenting their views as abnormal, antisocial, racist, and xenophobic. Isgro hasn’t said anything millions of conservatives haven’t said before, but the open-borders movement and its attack dogs in both political parties are always on the lookout for new scalps.

Some Republicans like Maine Senate Minority Leader Dana Dow attack Isgro for standing up for America and American values, while others praise him for his principled stands. Isgro, who said he has received “a massive outcry of support,” is also mayor of Waterville, Maine. He survived a recall election in June.

Isgro said he wrote the controversial tweets “to open a dialogue concerning all of the things that are in play when affecting public health policy.”

As the father of five children, I know exactly what it’s like to be a parent up in the middle of the night, with a child with high fever and wondering if things are going to be okay. It angers me to see families like mine attacked for simply wanting to do with [sic] they know what is best for their own children rather than the government. Families should be engaged and respected – not attacked. [M]y own family will always be my first priority and I will continue to defend the families of Maine and their freedoms.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Government Makes a Pizzeria Take Down a Mural of Pizza By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on March 21st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/pizzeria-mural-city-government-regulations-sign-code/

But a mural of something else (burgers, cars, unicorns … ) would be just fine.

The government of Arlington, Va., just forced a local pizza restaurant to paint over a mural of pizza that was outside of it — because the mural was of pizza and not something else.

So, you might ask: What could possibly be the problem with an artistic depiction of pizza? After all, I myself saw a lot of cartoon pizza in episodes of Ninja Turtles as a child, and I can confidently say I have suffered absolutely no damage — emotionally or physically — because of it.

Well, according to an article in Reason, the pizza place (called “Goody’s”) was forced to paint over the mural because of the county’s sign code, which prohibits any business from having a mural outside that depicts what’s sold inside. So, basically, the pizza place could have had a mural of pretty much anything else (aside from, like, violence and/or pornography, probably), and it would have been just fine. Here’s the thing, though: Why the hell would the pizza place have a mural of something other than pizza, if the goal of the mural was to get people to buy more pizza? Not to mention the obvious fact that there is literally no discernable reason that a business shouldn’t be able to advertise its legal, family-friendly products using a mural if it chooses to do so. After all, I did a little research, and I was able to find exactly zero examples of anyone being killed (or even injured!) by a painting of dough, sauce, and cheese.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Vanity Fair What the college-admissions scandal tells us about America’s broken meritocracy Kay S. Hymowitz

Posted By on March 20th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/college-admissions-scandal-meritocracy

If, like me, you’re an avid observer of human affairs at their most vain and status-crazed, you have been studying the College Cheating Scandal, or what investigators called Operation Varsity Blues, with all the intensity of a rabbinical scholar poring over Leviticus. Each reading yields delicious new details of greed, ambition, hypocrisy, and decadence. “Ah! Vanitas, Vanitatum!” as the author of the classic nineteenth-century novel Vanity Fair sighed. But eventually the mordant fun gives way to the recognition that what we have here is evidence of a serious sickness in the American meritocracy.

The story is well known by now, but before it disappears into the overflowing landfill of tawdry contemporary Americana, some of its more obscure gems deserve a farewell salute. Let’s begin with the master of ceremonies, William “Rick” Singer, owner of a Newport Beach, California college-consulting company. Singer bribed college coaches and staged mockups of his clients’ slacker children at athletic events, sometimes photoshopping their faces onto a picture of actual soccer players or rowers, or, weirdly, pole-vaulters. A 36-year-old Harvard grad, Mark Riddell, could take a standardized test and get an agreed-upon, specific score with the precision of an expert archer. Singer hired him to take or to correct tests for clients whose preliminary scores would put them on the reject pile: Riddell is now Cooperating Witness #2. My favorite bit of chicanery was Singer’s money-laundering operation. To hide the eye-catching sums that he was earning for his ploys—and to give his clients the extra perk of a (legal) tax deduction for their (illegal) contributions—Singer set up the Key Worldwide Foundation, which he advertised as “provid[ing] guidance, encouragement and opportunity to disadvantaged students around the world.” The IRS estimates that Singer earned $25 million for his good works.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Results of Study of Trans Teens Unchanged after Activists Force Review By Jack Crowe

Posted By on March 20th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/transgender-teen-study-results-unchanged-activists-forced-review/

A Brown University professor’s study of a “social contagion” effect among transgender teenagers was republished with its results section unchanged Tuesday following an unprecedented post-publication review prompted by a wave of backlash from transgender activists and researchers sympathetic to their cause.

Dr. Lisa Littman’s paper, “Parent Reports of Adolescents and Young Adults Perceived to Show Signs of a Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria,” explores a little-understood phenomenon in which a statistically abnormal number of teens, mostly girls, belonging to the same established friend group claim they are transgender within a short period of time.

The study, which relied on findings from a 90-question survey completed by 256 parents of transgender youths, immediately drew the ire of trans activists when it was published in August 2018, because its findings suggested that rising rates of gender dysphoria among teens may be the result of socialization, rather than inherent biological factors.

Brown University removed a press release announcing the study’s publication after the academic journal PLOS ONE conceded to activists’ demand that it take the highly unusual step of ordering a post-publication review. But following that review, the paper was republished with an unchanged results section and a few additions included to provide “additional context.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

It’s Time to KISS by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on March 20th, 2019

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22477/it-time-to-kiss

The familiar acronym KISS, “keep it simple stupid,” began as a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in the 1960s according to Wikipedia. “The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore, simplicity should be a key goal in design, and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

The current maelstrom created by Fox News suspending Judge Jeanine Pirro over a question she posed concerning the symbolism of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s hijab can best be understood using the KISS principle.

Mohammed, the 7th century prophet and founder of Islam, believed himself to be the messenger of the one and only god Allah. Mohammed believed that all people should honor Allah and only Allah. This was and continues to be the foundational premise of Islamic expansionism and its desire to establish a worldwide caliphate to make the whole world Muslim – including the United States. Islam is a replacement theology.

Islam has been at war with competing ideologies since the time of Mohammed but war is expensive. The Islamic movement’s fortunes waxed and waned over the centuries until oil was discovered in commercial quantities in Saudi Arabia in 1938. A seismic shift in geopolitical power took place and the oil rich Muslim nations were able to pursue their expansionist dreams of an Islamic caliphate once again.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Trump’s State Department Drops “Occupied Territory” Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on March 20th, 2019

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2019/03/20/trumps-state-department-drops-occupied-territory/

There is a difference between an “honest broker” and a “neutral arbiter.” In advance of the rollout of its Middle East peace plan, the Trump administration has taken a series of steps to ensure its role as the honest broker. The U.S. is not “neutral” between our ally, Israel, and the Palestinians who seek to replace it. But it won’t be easy to change presumptions that are deeply embedded in the process.

The State Department’s annual survey of human rights released this month referred to the Golan Heights simply as “Israeli-controlled territory,” ending its tradition of referring to the West Bank and Gaza Strip as “occupied territory.”

To the community of Washington professionals wedded to the “peace process,” that was an outrage! “Poof,” said one prominent commentator. “With a word change, Israel no longer occupies territory, they now control it. The strategic objective of this administration is to change U.S. policy on refugees; Jerusalem; territory. And they’re doing it.”

But the State Department is correct. The West Bank and Gaza are the remains of the British Mandate — in legal limbo since the Jordanians occupied it in 1948. The Golan Heights were captured after a Syrian attack in 1967 and a second Syrian attack in 1973.

For more than 25 years, the on-again-off-again “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians has been predicated on unlikely theories about “peace” and erroneous assumptions about both Palestinians, Israelis, and American foreign policy.

First, the process assumed Israel’s security problems are related to the non-state status of Palestinians — hence the name “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” And the proposed remedy was “the two-state solution,” an independent state for the Palestinians. More precisely, however, it is the “Arab-Israeli conflict” or the “Arab wars against Israel.” Arab states went to war in 1948 to erase Israel; they failed.