WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Saudis Hedge Their American Bets God may be great, but for Riyadh’s strategic purposes, China’s Xi Jinping apparently is greater. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on February 26th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-saudis-hedge-their-american-bets-11551138149

It is, in its way, the most shocking spectacle in world politics since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union: Even as Beijing is stepping up its persecution of Muslim Uighurs, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia cozied up to Chinese President Xi Jinping on his trip to China last week.

More than a million Uighur Muslims are said to be held in Chinese concentration and “re-education” camps, where beatings and mass rapes are reliably reported to be perpetrated against detainees. Yet the crown prince of the leading Sunni Islamic state signed almost $30 billion in trade agreements with China, hailed the long problem-free relationship between the two countries, pledged support for the Belt and Road initiative, and announced that Saudi Arabia respected China’s need to protect its domestic security in its own way.

God may be great, but Xi Jinping, apparently, is greater. Or at least more useful.

Saudi Arabia is not the only Muslim power kowtowing to China. Pakistan has also fallen strangely silent when it comes to the concentration camps now dotting the landscape in Xinjiang. A country that regularly whips itself into fits of murderous rage over the supposed plight of Muslims in Indian-controlled Kashmir remains rigorously calm about the massive religious repression by its more powerful neighbor.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: “No Place for the Zionist Entity in Palestine” by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on February 26th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13796/palestinians-zionist-entity

Hamas and Islamic Jihad should be given credit for their clarity and honesty regarding their ambitions. The two groups are clearly saying that their ultimate goal is to see Israel removed from the region and replaced with an Islamic state. As far as they are concerned, the conflict with Israel is not about a settlement, a checkpoint or even Jerusalem. Instead, it is about the presence of Jews in what they regard as their own state and homeland.

What will happen the day after a Palestinian state is established? The answer, according to Hamas and Islamic Jihad (and other Palestinians) is that they will use it to continue the “armed struggle” until the liberation of the supposedly occupied cities of Tel Aviv, Nazareth, Tiberias, Haifa and Ashdod. Under these current circumstances, a Palestinian state will pose an immediate existential danger to Israel.

The Islamic Jihad threat to turn Israeli cities into “hell” by firing missiles at them needs to be taken seriously by those who are working on the upcoming US peace plan. Any land that is given to Abbas and his Palestinian Authority in the West Bank will be used in the future by Hamas and Islamic Jihad as a base for launching rockets and missiles at Israeli cities. Then, the terror groups will not need accurate, long-range rockets to achieve their plan to destroy Israel’s population centers: they will be sitting right across the street from them.

A Palestinian terror group says that its engineers have developed “accurate and destructive” missiles that can reach the “occupied” cities of Tel Aviv, Netanya and Jerusalem. Abu Hamza, spokesman for the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Iranian-funded Islamic Jihad organization in the Gaza Strip, threatened that his group’s “rocket unit” would turn Israeli cities into “hell.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ireland’s Raw Bigotry by Peter Baum

Posted By on February 26th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13786/ireland-raw-bigotry

The Irish legislation, banning the import of goods from Israeli communities located beyond the 1949 armistice lines, not only coincides ironically with the U.S. Senate passage of a motion to prevent anti-Israel boycotts, but also constitutes a breach of European trade law.

These Irish “humanitarians” also do not seem to care about the suffering of the inhabitants of the Palestinian Authority and the Gaza Strip, who continue to suffer from large-scale abuse and persecution at the hands of their own despotic leaders.

Meanwhile, other nations actually guilty of serious human rights abuses, war crimes and ethnic cleansing — such as Syria, Iran, China, North Korea, Turkey and Russia, to name a few — are spared Irish indignation and legislation.

Ireland’s legislation appears to be less about actually helping Palestinians to have better lives than an effort to eradicate Israel.

Parliamentarians in the Republic of Ireland are displaying an unprecedented level of hostility towards Israel, unparalleled by that of any other member state of the European Union — inviting the question about Ireland’s long, distasteful history of anti-Semitism, which clearly predates the frequently used pretext of hating the State of Israel.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How the Trump Administration Should Counter Putin’s Policies in Ukraine and Venezuela by Jiri Valenta

Posted By on February 26th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13795/trump-putin-ukraine-venezuela

If Nicolás Maduro is removed from office in Venezuela, Putin might act as he did when a popular revolution overthrew Yanukovych in Ukraine, in 2014: with a surprise invasion of the Crimea. This time, Putin may launch a surprise naval and land attack on Mariupol, set up a land bridge from Crimea to Russia and continue intensifying his attempt to strangle Ukraine’s economy in order to subjugate Ukraine to Russia. Trump needs to take immediate preemptive measures to prevent Putin from doing that by increasing naval aid to Kiev.

So far, Putin seems to have been counting on a lack of American resolve regarding Venezuela, and has just succeeded in getting China to support him.

If America abdicates its role in Venezuela, you can bet Russia will eventually build intelligence facilities there. Russia has also been providing Nicaragua with “sophisticated weaponry,” including “T-72 tanks, war boats, warplanes, and powerful bombs.”

Above all, President Trump must continue as he is doing now, to work towards liberating the Venezuelan people. Any hesitation will be counterproductive.

America is facing two dangerous crises. In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, the illegitimate winner of a reportedly sham election, has, with his socialist policies, created a catastrophic situation. The struggle in Venezuela between his challenger, Juan Guaidó, and him is reaching a crescendo. Millions of Venezuelans, suffering under his radical regime, have been flooding neighboring Brazil and Colombia. Yet, with the help of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Maduro is clinging to power, as Fidel Castro did in the early 1960s with the aid of Nikita Khrushchev.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

NYC to Pay $3.3 Million to Family of Teen Who Languished at Rikers Island Lawyer representing Mr. Browder’s estate called the settlement fair

Posted By on February 25th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nyc-to-pay-3-3-million-to-family-of-teen-who-languished-at-rikers-island-11548371523?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=3

New York City will pay $3.3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of the teenager who spent three years at the Rikers Island jail complex after being accused of stealing a backpack, becoming a symbol of dysfunction in the criminal-justice system.

In 2010, 16-year-old Kalief Browder, originally from the Bronx, was arrested and held at Rikers on $3,000 bail. He spent time in solitary confinement and returned to court dozens of times. In 2013, the charges were dismissed. After his release, Mr. Browder died by suicide in 2015 at the age of 22.

“Kalief Browder’s story helped inspire numerous reforms to the justice system to prevent this tragedy from ever happening again, including an end to punitive segregation for young people on Rikers Island,” a spokesman for the New York City Law Department said on Thursday. “We hope that this settlement and our continuing reforms help bring some measure of closure to the Browder family.”

The city didn’t acknowledge wrongdoing in the settlement.

“This was a fair and reasonable settlement,” said lawyer Sanford Rubenstein, who represents Mr. Browder’s estate.

The $3.3 million settlement includes attorney fees and expenses. A surrogate judge will determine how the money is distributed among Mr. Browder’s family members.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bailing on Bail Reform A progressive New York criminal-justice group walks back from an unsustainable position. Seth Barron

Posted By on February 25th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/bail-reform

Last September, as part of a national push for criminal-justice reform, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, a charitable organization, announced a plan to pay the bail of every woman and minor held in New York City’s jails. According to the group, run by Kerry Kennedy, the slain senator’s daughter, “access to justice depends on whether you can afford bail. The majority of people incarcerated in the notoriously violent Rikers Island are behind bars for the crime of being too poor.”

This is a favorite theme of the reformers, but most Rikers inmates are accused of serious crimes. Around 11.4 percent of the population is there for murder, attempted murder, or manslaughter; 20 percent are in for robbery or burglary; and another 25 percent face charges involving weapons, felony assault, sale of drugs, or rape or other sexual offenses. New York’s jails are not crowded with people whose only crime was jumping a subway turnstile or smoking weed; the average number of people held in Rikers on a given day for fare-beating is two, and for pot possession, one. And “the majority” of Rikers inmates are behind bars because they’re serving out a sentence, are ineligible for bail because of outstanding warrants, or are awaiting trial for a serious crime—not because they can’t afford bail. Even the majority of women and juveniles at Rikers, the target of the Kennedy group’s efforts, are ineligible for bail.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The search for viewpoint diversity in higher education. Samuel Abrams

Posted By on February 25th, 2019

https://spectator.us/viewpoint-diversity-higher-education/

America’s colleges are deeply embedded in and influenced by the local communities where they are geographically situated.

While so much of higher-education in the United States is dominated by politically active and overwhelmingly liberal college administrators – the ever growing professional class of administrators who call the shots outside the classroom – it turns out that that not every college looks like those in New England which has a 25:1 ratio of liberal to conservative administrators.

As warnings about the diminution of viewpoint diversity become louder, understanding where and why there are some schools that are not completely progressive in orientation should be better understood and one explanation for this is geography: America’s institutions of higher education are deeply embedded in and influenced by the local communities where they are spatially situated. Thus, college administrators are not as uniformly left-wing in those areas that have surrounding Republican majorities.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Op Ed: Use ‘Partner’ Instead of ‘Boyfriend’ or ‘Girlfriend’ to Be ‘Politically Correct’ By Katherine Timpf….see note please

Posted By on February 25th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/op-ed-use-partner-instead-of-boyfriend-or-girlfriend-to-be-politically-correct/

Partner sounds so businesslike. How about “colleague” or “consort” or ” comrade” or “sidekick”??? rsk

Simply giving something a different name doesn’t change the fact that it’s still the exact same thing that it was before you changed that name.

According to a piece in the Daily O, people should stop using the words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” to refer to their significant others and use the word “partner” instead — because that’s “politically correct.”

“The term ‘partner’ — with its gender-neutral connotation — is politically correct and socially appropriate,” Saonli Hazra writes in a piece titled “Why it is time to move from the conventional ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ and switch to ‘partner’ instead.”

“With the growth of the Internet, and a transformation in the social order where casual dating, open relationships, delayed marriages and other such practices are finding favour, terms like ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ have a certain undesirable vibe,” she continues. “Mostly, these set limitations of gender roles — of what each partner ought to bring at the relationship table.”

“Partner,” she argues “has a nice, positive ring to it, and neither party feels the suffocating or debilitating pressure of trying to live up to certain preset notions.”

“‘Wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ usually come with patriarchal riders, and therefore, a women’s status within the marriage is often unequal,” she explains.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Poll: Americans’ Confidence in Nation’s World Image Grows By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on February 25th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-americans-confidence-in-nations-world-image-grows/

58 percent of respondents in a Gallup poll of American adults released Monday said they believe the U.S. is seen “very favorably” or “somewhat favorably” by the rest of the world — a three-point increase from last year’s survey, and the highest percentage recorded by the poll since 2003.

About 80 percent of Republicans and 36 percent of Democrats said the country is seen favorably by the rest of the world, and neither number represented much change from last year. But the number of independents who said the same jumped eight points.

Despite the broad confidence in America’s image, only a small percentage of respondents, 31 percent, said the current president is respected by foreign leaders.

Respondents’ confidence in how other countries see the U.S. appears to be separate from confidence in the Trump administration, whose controversial foreign-policy decisions have sometimes been criticized on both sides of the aisle. It also appears to be separate from their confidence in the nation’s position on the global stage, with which 53 percent of them expressed dissatisfaction.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Lies, Controversies, and Allegations By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on February 25th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-lies-controversies-and-allegations/

Making the click-through worthwhile: I relent and drink from the firehose of statements, lies, stories, controversies, allegations, and accusations of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — from her Malthusian impulses to her strangely delayed district office to what her stance on Congressional staffer salaries actually means for her office.

Ocasio-Cortez: ‘A Legitimate Question, You Know, Is It Okay to Still Have Children?’

“There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, is it okay to still have children?” — Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, discussing climate change in a livestream Sunday night, while chopping vegetables in her kitchen.

There is ample evidence that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is over-covered by both the mainstream media and conservative media. She’s been in office about two months. She is near the very bottom of House Democrats in terms of seniority. There is considerable evidence that Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t take her or “the green dream, whatever they call it” seriously.