FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Switzerland’s Foreign Policy Should Be a Model for America By Brandon J. Weichert

Posted By on March 8th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/07/

As I have written previously, many elites think of the United States as being in a position similar to that of the vulnerable Hapsburg Empire: a large empire possessing indefensible frontiers. But, this comparison flawed. In fact, a more precise analogue to the United States is Switzerland.

A federal republic like the United States, Switzerland enjoys a natural barrier separating it from the rest of its neighbors in Europe. The United States has two massive oceans, whereas Switzerland has the beautiful Swiss Alps. From behind these natural barriers, the liberty-loving Swiss republic formed, and by European standards, so did a potent market economy. Switzerland hasn’t always been a peaceful state, but it has been able to maintain peaceful relations with all of its neighbors better than most other states. Its beneficial geography has afforded Swiss leaders the time to develop reasonable, low-cost methods for maintaining their country’s sovereignty without becoming too enmeshed in the chaotic world beyond its protective peaks.

Switzerland is not an isolationist country, however. Like the United States throughout most of its history, the Swiss simply prefer to rely on diplomacy and trade to handle the bulk of their interactions with most of the world. Switzerland has a robust international trading profile and is even an observing member in the flagging European Union. That said, it is not a full member of the EU. Such a membership would have threatened the Swiss freedom of action and they wisely avoided such a step. The Swiss interact with the surrounding world only when and how it benefits them.

Switzerland is also internationally respected. Today, America’s acceptance of an ever-increasing array of never-ending foreign entanglements has drained it of vital resources (and people) that could be put to better use making our Union more perfect.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Deputy Sheriff Nezar Hamze Leaves CAIR to Head Terror Umbrella Group And he still gets to keep the badge and gun! Joe Kaufman

Posted By on March 8th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273072/deputy-sheriff-nezar-hamze-leaves-cair-head-terror-joe-kaufman

CAIR-Florida has taken down from its website Nezar Hamze’s photo and bio, as he has left the Hamas-linked group and gone elsewhere. His new position, however, poses no less of a threat. Hamze, who is also a Deputy at the Broward County Sheriff’s Office (BSO), is now the Executive Director of the South Florida Muslim Federation (SFMF), an umbrella group for South Florida’s many radical Muslim organizations, which includes CAIR. Given the obvious conflict of interests, it is a wonder how Hamze has been allowed to keep his position within the Sheriff’s Department, while holding these terror-related side-jobs. No doubt, he has been and continues to be a danger to the community, which ironically he has sworn to protect.

Nezar Jason Nazih Hamze, the Michigan-born son of Lebanese immigrants, spent over a decade of involvement with CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He began as a member of the group’s Florida Executive Committee, in 2008, the same year that CAIR was named an “unindicted co-conspirator” by the US government for the Hamas-financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), where all of the defendants in the trial were found guilty of all charges brought against them.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Battle Against Leftist Indoctrination in Public Schools Continues in Maine Sponsor of defeated anti-indoctrination legislation isn’t finished with the Left yet. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on March 8th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273091/battle-against-leftist-indoctrination-public-matthew-vadum

Maine state representative Lawrence Lockman isn’t backing down after a committee in the state legislature killed his proposed bill that would have forbidden political and ideological indoctrination in the public schools of the Pine Tree State.

Leftist indoctrination in the classroom “is a violation of the civil rights of the students,” Lockman told FrontPage. Politically correct identity-group politics is now the norm in Maine’s classrooms, he said. (FrontPage published an op-ed by Lockman on March 5.)

“Realtors, architects, dental hygienists, have a code of ethics,” he said. “Why not teachers?”

Teachers were wrong to get involved in and bring students to a previous demonstration to lobby for the passage of legislation restricting firearms, Lockman said.

“It’s outrageous that teachers are taking sides on a legislative issue.”

“The kids were used,” he said. “They were pawns. They were dupes.”

“If the gun owners of Maine were having a demonstration or a rally to press for pro-firearms legislation I would just as strongly have opposed teachers getting involved in that.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Socialism Dies in the Darkness By Richard Fernandez

Posted By on March 8th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/socialism-dies-in-the-darkness/

“A major power outage hit crisis-stricken Venezuela on Thursday, according to Reuters … a problem the government of President Nicolas Maduro quickly blamed on ‘sabotage’ at a hydroelectric dam that provides much of the country’s power.” National life ground to a standstill, telecommunications — including the Internet — stopped working, hospitals were plunged into darkness and cities of millions lay helpless without electricity.

As the outage continued into Friday spreading to every Venezuelan state, it became clear this was going to become the biggest of all blackouts yet and Maduro’s officials increasingly pointed a finger at the United States. But the national electric grid had also been teetering for a long time. “Crumbling infrastructure and lack of investments have hit Venezuela’s power supply for years.” Outages had become a way of life and there was no easy way of proving this wasn’t ‘sabotage’ but only more of the same dysfunction.

The government has blamed the outages on a variety of things — including pesky animals. In an Oct. 20 tweet, Energy Minister Luis Motta Dominguez named “rats, mice, snakes, cats, squirrels” as possible culprits in shorting out lines. He added: “In the list of animals mentioned above, of course iguanas are included.”

Critics, however, say insufficient investment by the government is the cause, following the 2007 nationalization of the electricity sector.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

UNHRC Spews Another Modern-Day Blood Libel Irredeemably-biased UN body demonstrates its Jew-hate yet again. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on March 8th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273063/unhrc-spews-another-modern-day-blood-libel-ari-lieberman

The United Nations Human Rights Council, the body that sanctioned and peddled the now infamous and thoroughly discredited Goldstone Report (later repudiated by its principle author, Richard Goldstone) is at it again. Late last week, the UNHRC, whose membership includes democracy stalwarts like Cuba, Venezuela, Pakistan and China, released a commission of inquiry (COI)report accusing Israel of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity by deliberately targeting “journalists, health workers, children and persons with disabilities, knowing they were clearly recognizable as such.”

The 22-page report purportedly examined the deaths of 189 Gazans allegedly at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces since March 30, 2018. That date coincides with the beginning of the Hamas–orchestrated and choreographed Palestinian riots along the Gaza border, dubbed by the terror group, “the Great March of Return.”

Israel did not cooperate with the UNHRC’s investigators and for good reason. The UNHRC is an irredeemably flawed organization whose well-documented bias has made it the poster child for antisemitism on the world stage. The body is obsessed with vilifying Israel to the exclusion of all other nations and maintains the infamous Agenda Item 7, which mandates debate on Israeli actions against Palestinians at every council session. No other nation on the planet, including those with abysmal human rights records, is subjected to such outrageous treatment.

Clearly, there can be but one reason for such “special” treatment. Seventy-four years after the Holocaust and the martyrdom of six-million Jews, the United Nations chooses to obsessively focus its negative energies on the world’s only Jewish nation. The same fascist, anti-Semitic ideology that infected Germany then, infects today’s UNHRC and similar UN committees like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. UNESCO is driven by a near-mad obsession with severing the Jewish nexus to the Land of Israel.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Bravest Man In Africa? Anti-slavery activist runs for president in slave state of Mauritania – after release from prison. Stephen Brown

Posted By on March 8th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273085/bravest-man-africa-stephen-brown

There are few people who announce their candidacy for their country’s presidency only days after being released from prison. But anti-slavery activist and slave descendant Biram Dah Abeid is an exceptional man facing exceptional circumstances.

“I am from the servile community that makes up 50 per cent of the population (of Mauritania),” said Dah Obeid, a lawyer. “Twenty percent of the fifty percent have been born as property of other men. We were inherited by other people.”

Abeid, a prominent and fearless anti-slavery activist who has been jailed and tortured numerous times in his struggle to abolish slavery in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, was released from prison last December 31, having been incarcerated on “an order from above.” Only days later, he again announced his candidacy, having also run for president in Mauritania’s 2014 federal election.

At that time, Dah Abeid, who heads the anti-slavery organization Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA), presented Mauritanians with the extraordinary and ground-shaking sight of a slave descendant (his father was a freed slave while his mother and uncles remained slaves) under sentence of death of a sharia court and imprisoned numerous times standing for president. Nevertheless, he won eight per cent of the vote, coming in second. Abdel Aziz, a former army general, won with 81.94, not unusual for an African dictatorship.

“We are the only ones to have a different ideological position,” Dah Obeid told Le Courier de Sahel during that campaign. “We are fighting against slavery, against racism, against government waste and corruption.”

Jeremy Keenan, a professorial research associate at the School of Africa and Oriental Studies at the University of London stated the reason for Aziz’s overwhelming victory: “Mauritanian elections under President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz are neither free, fair nor transparent.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

As the Democrats Go Socialist, They Go Anti-Semitic Jew-hate and socialism have always gone hand in hand. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 8th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273078/democrats-go-socialist-they-go-anti-semitic-daniel-greenfield

“Every government having regard to good morals ought to repress the Jews,” opined Pierre Leroux, the leftist credited with coining the term ‘Socialism’. “When we speak of Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce.”

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money,” Karl Marx ranted.

American socialism traces its ideological ancestry to Charles Fourier, a French socialist bigot who declared that Jews were the embodiment of capitalism, “parasites, merchants, usurers”, and the “incarnation of commerce: parasitical, deceitful, traitorous and unproductive”.

Even the term ‘anti-Semite’ was popularized by Wilhelm Marr, the socialist founder of the League of Antisemites. The inventor of anti-Semitism’s arguments were the same ones put forward by Marx, Fourier, H.G. Wells, Lenin and countless other socialists. The Jews were all about the ‘Benjamins’. They started wars. They were disloyal and manipulated society. They were a dangerous foreign element.

These are the same tropes that were put forward by Rep. Ilhan Omar and defended by her socialist allies in the House Progressive Caucus and across the media. Anti-Semitism is one of the meeting points between socialists and Islamists. The more anti-Semitism she spews, the more Rep. Omar unites the identity politics caucus of minority group racial nationalists and Islamists, with the traditional Left.

BOOKS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Victor Davis Hanson, Best-Selling, Smeared Author By Jack Fowler

Posted By on March 8th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/victor-davis-hanson-best-selling-smeared-author/
Sophistry in the Service of Evil
A review of ‘The Case for Trump’ by Victor Davis Hanson
by Gabriel Schoenfeld

Last night our colleague Victor Davis Hanson, the author of the new bestseller The Case for Trump, was on Fox News Channel’s The Story with Martha MacCullum vigorously attacking anti-Semitism. Today, taking a break from mocking pro-lifers, The Bulwark published an aggressive attack on the book and its author, in which reviewer Gabriel Schoenfeld casts VDH as a modern-day version of a Nazi mouthpiece and sympathizer. Somewhere in some fiery pit, Gore Vidal is smiling in admiration.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Change Theory: What’s Wrong with it? By William Lippincott

Posted By on March 8th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/climate_change_theory_whats_wrong_with_it.html

Dr. William Lippincott is a retired environment scientist. His inferences are based on extensive literature research on the mechanisms of climate variability, a task open to any student of the scientific method.

How climate alarmism is being sold in a distinctly unscientific manner.
I can’t believe I’m still writing about climate change. I’d have stopped long ago were it not for persistent calls to blow up the U.S. economy in order to save the planet. The cult-like demand for action permeates every part of public life, government, media, academia, even K-12. Rep. Among the draconian policy solutions, Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would have enormous negative impact on our economy.

For the record, climate does vary — think ice ages. And a combination of natural climate variability and measurement problems make the likelihood of singling out a human fingerprint very low. I look here at how climate alarmism is being sold in a distinctly unscientific manner.

The term ‘science’ properly refers to the scientific method, which is a system of inference designed to weed out incorrect ideas in favor of those supported by experiment and observation. The crux of the scientific method is rejection of theory rather than proof of it. From Bacon to Hopper and Feinman, it has been well understood that scientific theory must be “falsifiable,” that is, subject to test and rejection. Falsifiability depends on narrow and specific conditions imposed by theory. If the conditions fail, the theory is wrong.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Right From Wrong: Sexual-harassment hypocrisy? Ruthie Blum

Posted By on March 8th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-From-Wrong-Sexual-harassment-hypocrisy-582783
The exception to this rule, it turns out, is a woman whose accusations could cause problems for the only candidate who poses a threat to Netanyahu’s continued premiership.

When Israeli ex-pat Navarone (Nava) Jacobs came forward on February 27 with a Facebook post about having been sexually victimized by Blue and White Party chairman Benny Gantz some 40 years ago, the only person who seemed to respond without stammering was the alleged perpetrator himself.

Indeed, while the Israeli #MeToo movement barely blinked over the allegations – and said that there is “no corroborating evidence” to back up Jacobs’s account – Gantz immediately filed a NIS 500,000 ($142,000) libel suit against her at the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court. The suit claims that Jacobs’s accusations are “false from start to finish,” and that she “acted at the behest of, or with the help of political parties that seek to humiliate and discredit Gantz,” ahead of the April 9 Knesset elections.

In her social-media post, the New York-based Jacobs, who has been living in the United States since 1980, wrote that when she was a 14-year-old freshman at Hakfar Hayarok boarding school in Ramat Hasharon, Gantz — who was 17 or 18 at the time and a senior at the same institution — cornered her in the cowshed and exposed himself.