ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel gives Irish ambassador severe dressing down for ‘anti-Semitic’ Dáil Bill Israel says Dublin should concentrate on ‘dark dictatorships’ Mark Weiss

Posted By on January 25th, 2019

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/israel-gives-irish-ambassador-severe-dressing-down-for-anti-semitic-d%C3%A1il-bill-1.3770529

Irish ambassador to Israel Alison Kelly has been warned of “serious consequences” for Irish-Israel relations and Dublin’s standing in the region if the controversial Bill prohibiting importing goods from the occupied territories in Palestine becomes law.

The ministry said Ms Kelly was given an “angry rebuke” over the “scandalous” Bill. The severe diplomatic dressing down at the foreign ministry in Jerusalem on Friday morning followed Thursday’s passage of the first reading of the measure in the Dáil.

The Israeli government described the Bill, which covers goods produced on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Golan Heights and in east Jerusalem, as “hypocritical and anti-Semitic.”

Israeli officials told the ambassador that Dublin should “concentrate on dark dictatorships and terrorist organisations instead of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Czech lawmakers adopt common definition of anti-Semitism

Posted By on January 25th, 2019

http://www.israelhayom.com/2019/01/25/czech-lawmakers-adopt-common-definition-of-anti-semitism/

Anti-Semitism in the Czech Republic is at a relatively low level, according to The Associated Press.

Although the definition by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is not binding, Czech lawmaker says it could help authorities deal with hate crimes • The definition has already been adopted by a number of European parliaments and Israel.

The Czech Parliament’s lower house on Friday adopted a resolution that recognizes a common international definition of anti-Semitism.

Although the definition by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is not binding, lower house speaker Radek Vondráček says it could help authorities deal with hate crimes.

The 2016 definition says anti-Semitism is “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” It includes attacks against Jewish religious and community institutions, Jews and non-Jews and their property that are attacked for anti-Semitic reasons.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trio of family members jailed for having terrorist propaganda

Posted By on January 25th, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/25/trio-family-members-jailed-having-terrorist-propaganda/

Three members of the same family have been jailed for terror offences after police foiled a jewellery raid they believe was intended to fund Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

Asma Aweys, 30, her partner Abdulaziz Abu Munye, 27, and her brother Ahmed Aweys, 33, were all arrested when police investigating a burglary plot found terrorist propaganda on their mobile devices.

In one message, Aweys, a mother-of-two from Edmonton in north London, labelled Ariana Grande as “the devil” in relation to the Manchester bombing and described the Westminster terror attack as the “decree of Allah.”

Aweys was also found to have three copies of the English language IS magazine Rumiyah on her phone last April.

Articles in the publications offered advice such as how to “inflict misery and destruction on the enemies of Allah” through methods including vehicle attacks.
Ahmed Aweys was arrested following an investigation into a jewellery heist plot
Ahmed Aweys was arrested following an investigation into a jewellery heist plot

Tips on the best way to injure people using knives, including which type of blade is most effective, were also contained in the magazines.

There was also information about how to make Molotov cocktails and napalm to be used in arson attacks.

Munye, who lived with Aweys also sent a a 58-minute IS propaganda video, called Flames Of War 2, to his brother in law.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

‘Social Justice’ Is Unjust By Noah Rothman

Posted By on January 25th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/social-justice-rhetoric-all-purpose-excuse-democrats/For a new generation of Democrats, what the phrase denotes is indistinguishable from retribution.

‘No other Congress has ever looked like this,” declared a CNN dispatch on the makeup of the 116th Congress. With such a diverse group of new legislators, that’s undoubtedly true. More importantly, though, no Congress has ever thought like this. As a new generation of Democrats assumes power, they’re bringing their ideas about what constitutes “social justice” with them.

It is particularly instructive to examine how this class of legislators defines social justice. When Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) took the oath of office, for example, she initially planned on doing so on Thomas Jefferson’s 1734 translation of the Qur’an. But the Palestinian-American legislator reserved the right to use her own copy of the Qur’an. “Why uplift someone else?” she told the Detroit Free Press. “It’s starting a new era in social justice.” Why “uplift” Thomas Jefferson, indeed?

This self-referential attitude is a feature of the modern social-justice movement, and it helps to explain why it is so focused on engineering oppressive reversals of fortune.

Before coming to Congress, Tlaib told The Intercept that she is a proud supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to stigmatize activities that legitimize the state of Israel. To her, BDS brings attention to “issues like the racism and the international human-rights violations by Israel right now.” Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) shares Tlaib’s proclivities. “I have always had a very social-justice-bent approach to everything that I do in my life,” Omar told ABC News.

On their way into federal office, these two lawmakers brought Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour along with them. Sarsour was on hand in the Capitol on their first day in office, even though she was at the center of an anti-Semitism scandal not two months ago — a scandal rooted in the social-justice movement’s obsession with crafting racial and demographic pecking orders.

BOOKS Comments turned off

It’s A Perfect Time To Rediscover The Virtues Of Andrew Jackson Bradley Birzer’s ‘In Defense of Andrew Jackson’ offers a lucid portrait of an American president who is often misunderstood and neglected, even by the conservatives who should most admire him. By Gordon Dakota Arnold

Posted By on January 25th, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/25/rediscovering-the-virtues-of-andrew-jackson/

Few Americans in the country’s history have received the polarized interpretations that President Andrew Jackson has. Once revered as the quintessential frontier hero, a statesman who saved rugged individualism from the corrupt forces of corporatists and government centralizers, Jackson has more recently been maligned as a brutal white supremacist who epitomized white, capitalist, and Southern bigotry in the 19th century.

On this point, there is an unlikely alliance between some conservatives and Marxists. Dinesh D’Souza attacks Jackson as an early “progressive Democrat” who ushered in the Democratic Party’s legacy of genocide. The neo-Marxist Howard Zinn, similarly, scorns him as a “slave owner,” a “killer of Indians,” and “the architect of the Trail of Tears.” Adding to the confusion, Jackson has been appropriated by rather unlikely allies, such as the government centralizers of the New Deal era, who argued that Jackson anticipated the New Deal’s concentration of power in the hands of the presidency for the purpose of fulfilling the will of the majority.

Against the facile misinterpretations and half-truths touted both by friends and foes of President Jackson, Bradley Birzer’s In Defense of Andrew Jackson offers a thoughtful, refreshing, and timely analysis of our hopelessly misunderstood seventh president. Birzer, a historian at Hillsdale College, paints a vivid portrait of Jackson as both a man and as a statesman.

He should be perceived, Birzer demonstrates, not as the ancestor of majoritarian New Deal democracy but as a principled defender of traditional American republicanism. Eloquently written and amply supported by historical evidence, In Defense of Andrew Jackson serves as a sorely needed reminder of the republican principles that inspired so many Americans in the 19th century—principles that Americans need desperately.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who Runs the Census? How the bureaucracy takes power away from elected officials.

Posted By on January 25th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-runs-the-census-11548376332

Another week, another liberal court injunction against the Trump Administration. This month a federal judge blocked the Commerce Department from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. At issue is whether the President and his appointees control the government bureaucracy or the other way around.

Liberals cheered when Obama officials invoked executive discretion to promote political objectives. Yet they’re now accusing Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross of improperly pursuing political purposes by reinstating a citizenship question on the 2020 census. Whatever his intentions, Mr. Ross acted within the purview granted by Congress.

***

The Constitution directs Congress once a decade to count every resident in the U.S. to reapportion House districts among the states. Congress has delegated Commerce, which houses the Census Bureau, broad discretion over survey subjects and directed the secretary to use statistical sampling if “he considers it feasible” to collect data.

A citizenship question was included until 1960 and later appeared on a long-form questionnaire received by one-sixth of households. The long form was replaced after 2000 by the American Community Survey, which samples about 2% of the population annually.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mueller stages full body armor predawn arrest of Roger Stone for CNN’s cameras By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on January 25th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/mueller_stages_full_body_armor_midnight_arrest_of_roger_stone_for_cnns_cameras.html

The latest “This is the beginning of the end for Trump…” orgasm in the mainstream media comes with serious action movie production values, courtesy of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller. Roger Stone, who could easily have been notified to turn himself in the way white-collar defendants who are no danger of fleeing normally are handled, was instead subjected to a humiliating midnight predawn raid with cars full of riot gear-clad FBI agents, all staged before the cameras of CNN, which was exclusively granted access to the scene worthy of an action movie. [Update: It is not clear who leaked newsof the raid to CNN, having the effect of staging it for the most anti-Trump of networks. ]This is similar to the treatment of Paul Manafort, but with the added indignity of CNN cameras.

It is notable that Stone was arrested over alleged process crimes, not for conspiracy with Russia, or even “collaboration” (which is not a crime).

Further comment on the six crimes alleged in the indictment will have to wait for more information. But it is clear that Mueller was shown his man first, and then found the crime, following the dictum of Stalin’s head of the KGB, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man, and I will find you the crime.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Desperate Embrace At Europe’s Core By Angelo Codevilla

Posted By on January 25th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/24/desperate-embrace

Europe’s most powerful personages on Tuesday signed a treaty for the “unification,” of Western Europe’s biggest countries. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel inked the deal at Aachen/Aix la Chapelle. It was there in the chapel that Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer had knelt at Holy Mass to celebrate the signing of the 1963 Franco-German treaty of cooperation that sealed their peoples’ vow of friendship and cooperation. In the ensuing half century, it produced just that. France and Germany became the core of the Common Market and then of the European Union.

Today’s treaty, its pretensions notwithstanding, is between regimes that are overwhelmingly occupied trying, with decreasing success, to fend off domestic challenges to their legitimacy. The treaty is a desperate attempt by France and Germany to change the subject from their internal struggles. Nevertheless, the treaty cannot but have major and deleterious effects on intra-European relations as well as on relations between Europe and the United States.

In 1963, de Gaulle and Adenauer had hoped for even greater coordination in foreign and defense policy as well but, under U.S. diplomatic pressure, the German Bundestag added a clause to the treaty’s ratification that privileged the Federal Republic’s defense relationship with America. By contrast, the 2019 treaty’s main thrust is to sever that clause. The two countries will act “as a single unit with regard to relations with third countries.”

Lest there be any doubt, the final sentence reads: “The admission of the Federal Republic of Germany as a permanent member of of the United Nations Security Council [where it would share France’s seat] is a priority of Franco-German diplomacy.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump: ‘We have reached a deal’ to end government shutdown for three weeks

Posted By on January 25th, 2019

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/01/25/shutdown-senate-leaders-talk-flight-delays-reported-airports/2676022002/

President Donald Trump said Friday he will support an agreement to end the partial government shutdown that does not include border wall funding, likely marking a close to the longest lapse in government services in U.S. history.

“We have reached a deal to end the shutdown and reopen the federal government,” he said.

Trump’s decision, which he announced during a hastily arranged address in the White House Rose Garden, came amid mounting pressure from members of Congress to end the impasse. That pressure only built Friday as airports along the East Coast reported delays due to a lack of air traffic controllers.

The deal, hammered out during negotiations with Senate leaders, would reopen the government for three weeks and does not include money for Trump’s proposed border wall. Democrats have flatly rejected funding for the wall until the government reopens.

Trump hinted at the possibility, once again, of declaring a national emergency to find money for his proposed border wall if Congress does not reach an agreement on that issue.

“I have a very powerful alternative, but I didn’t want to use it at this time,” Trump said.

HISTORY Comments turned off

Is Jerusalem a sacred Islamic City? There is a big difference between a city being sacred in the eyes of God and it being a sacred Islamic city. By Imam Tawhidi

Posted By on January 25th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Is-Jerusalem-a-sacred-Islamic-City-578560

Jerusalem is home to around 400,000 Muslims, but is it a sacred city according to Islam?

This is a question the majority of Muslims within the political and academic world try to avoid, simply because it opens a rather uncomfortable discussion. In fact, a Muslim asking such a question could face serious consequences; such as society doubting in his/her faith.Until 2014, I was an Islamist who abhorred Jewish people and was open to waging war against them. Today, however, I am friends with many Jewish faith leaders. This transition wasn’t political, it was rather theological. In brief, I started to question certain claims taught to me by my teachers and Muslim community. I began by asking myself the question, does Jerusalem really belong to Islam and Muslims?

To answer this vitally important question, we need to inquire how cities become sacred according to Islam.

Sacred cities in Islam
Throughout human history, every religion has been associated with an area that has been sanctified, respected and revered. Islam is no different. There are tens of sacred cities in Islam, such as Mecca, Medina, Qum, Karbala and Najaf – due to clear verses of the Koran acknowledging their glory or sayings of Prophet Mohammad assuring Muslims of their exaltation.