ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinian Threats to Arab Normalization with Israel by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on November 7th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13236/palestinian-normalization-israel

“There’s no place for the [Israeli] enemy on the map.” — Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas leader, October 29, 2018.

A number of senior Fatah officials, including Munir al-Jaghoob and Mohammed Shtayyeh, have condemned Oman for hosting Netanyahu. They have also condemned the UAE for allowing Israelis to participate in the judo competition.

So, Fatah and Hamas cannot agree to pay their workers, they cannot agree on supplying electricity to the Gaza Strip, and they cannot agree on providing medical supplies to hospitals there. They do agree, however, on inflicting more harm and damage on their people. If they go on like this, the day will come when the Palestinians will discover that their friends and brothers have become their biggest enemies.

For more than 10 years now, Hamas and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction have been at war with each other. Attempts by their Arab brothers, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to solve the power struggle between the two rival Palestinian groups have thus far failed and are unlikely to succeed in the foreseeable future. The gap between Hamas and Fatah remains as wide as ever: the two parties despise each other. Fatah wants to return to the Gaza Strip; Hamas says it out loud: no. Fatah wants Hamas to disarm and cede control over the Gaza Strip; Hamas says no.

On one particular issue, however, the two sides lay aside their differences and see eye to eye. When it comes to Israel, one would be hard-pressed to distinguish between Fatah and Hamas.

Both parties use the same harsh language when referring to Israel and the policies and decisions of the Israeli government. The daily statements condemning Israel that are issued separately by Hamas and Fatah sound almost identical. Both refer to Israel as the “state of occupation.” They also continue to incite Palestinians and the rest of the world against Israel by accusing it of committing “war crimes” against the Palestinians and “violating international law.”

EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Saudi “Donations” to American Universities Whitewash Its Religion by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on November 7th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13260/saudi-donations-american-universities

Saudi funding of an American academic “doesn’t mean that he’s bought and paid for.” Rather, “there is a kind of silencing effect. It’s more about what doesn’t get written about… there may be some self-censoring on certain topics you don’t raise unnecessarily, topics that are sensitive to the Saudis.” — from a Washington, DC “insider,” quoted in Vox.

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the heartland of Islam, the birthplace of its history, the site of the two holy mosques and the focus of Islamic devotion and prayer. Saudi Arabia is committed to preserving the Islamic tradition in all areas of government and society….. The Holy Qur’an is the constitution of the Kingdom and Shari’ah (Islamic law) is the basis of the Saudi legal system.” — Website of the Saudi Arabian Embassy, Washington, DC.

A Saudi fatwa — in Arabic only — entitled, “Duty to Hate Jews, Polytheists, and Other Infidels,” was written by Sheikh Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz (d. 1999), former grand mufti and highest religious authority in the government. It comes from the fatwa wing of the government, meaning it has the full weight of the government behind it.

Why would the center of illiberalism, religious fanaticism, and misogyny ever sponsor the center of liberalism, secularism, and gender equality?

This is the question that crops up when one considers the largesse that human-rights-abusing Saudi Arabia bestows on the leading universities — those putative bastions of progressive, free thinking — in the United States.

According to a recent report in the Daily Caller:

“… elite U.S. universities took more than half a billion dollars from the country [Saudi Arabia] and its affiliates between 2011 and 2017. Saudi Arabian interests paid $614 million to U.S. universities over a six-year period, more than every country but Qatar and the United Kingdom.”

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Front Runner – A Review By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on November 7th, 2018

http://politicalmavens.com/

There’s more heat in a New York Times putdown of Melania Trump’s wardrobe than in Jason Reitman’s biopic of Gary Hart’s aborted run for a presidential nomination in 1988. Overstuffed with tons of newsroom and campaign chatter, Reitman neglects to give the primary players – Hart and his wife – sufficient opportunity to deal with the complicated and conflicted inner feelings of a man and his wife watching their shot at a brilliant future slip down the drain. And not because of a grand love affair, but rather a casual dalliance with a young and as played here, vapid Donna Rice. In real life, Donna had a fresh–faced prettiness but Reitman casts her as an overly made-up girl who looks more like a lap dancer than a model or pharmaceutical salesman, both of which Donna was.

Hugh Jackman plays Senator Hart as a man who is blinded by his insistence on his right to a private life, with little understanding of the growing power of the press and television to make or break a person’s reputation. One of the best moments in the film is the footage of Johnny Carson summarizing Hart’s tone-deafness as he watches the late nite show. Though he has lived through the revelations of the Kennedy clan and Watergate, he seems baffled by the indignity of the press in hounding him at his home and digging up dirt that was floating on the surface on a boat named Monkey Business. We never see him crumble as he realizes the enormity of his mis-judgment and the enduring price he will pay for that. Strangely, the famous picture of Donna Rice perched on his lap on the cruise to Bimini is never shown. Vera Farmiga does the best she can as Hart’s long-suffering wife Lee who gets a shot at emotional fireworks on the piano, hardly sufficient to satisfy our curiosity.

What I was left with was the observation that at least what the press and public were castigating was Hart’s behavior at the time he was running and his hypocrisy at stressing morality and ethics while he himself was an adulterer. What a far cry from our recent outrage at the alleged behavior of a 17 year old student, 36 years before his nomination for the Supreme Court and 19 years after a sterling academic, political, judicial, social and personal life. How far we have fallen as we now consider that progress.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Our New Muslim Representatives Sharia, corruption, and Jew-hatred come to the House. Robert Spencer

Posted By on November 7th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271872/our-new-muslim-representatives-robert-spencer

As expected, two Muslim women, Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, have been overwhelmingly elected to Congress. The establishment media will celebrate these victories as triumphs of America’s “diversity”; unfortunately, in reality neither one is worth celebrating.

Tlaib is a vociferous foe of Israel. With the Democrats now regaining control of the House, Tlaib is likely to be an energetic proponent of the new majority’s vendetta against the Middle East’s only democracy. The House is likely to do all it can to roll back President Trump’s pro-Israel polices, with Tlaib as well as Omar as becoming the public faces of the effort.

According to the JTA, when Tlaib was asked if she would vote against military aid to Israel, Tlaib responded: “Absolutely, if it has something to do with inequality and not access to people having justice. For me, U.S. aid should be leverage. I will be using my position in Congress so that no country, not one, should be able to get aid from the U.S. when they still promote that kind of injustice.”

What kind of injustice? Tlaib, of course, had nothing to say about the genocidal incitement against Jews and Israel that regularly features on Palestinian television. She did say, however, that she favors a one-state, not two-state, “solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “One state. It has to be one state. Separate but equal does not work. I’m only 42 years old but my teachers were of that generation that marched with Martin Luther King. This whole idea of a two-state solution, it doesn’t work.”

Indeed it doesn’t. A Palestinian state would be a new base for renewed jihad attacks against Israel. But a “one-state solution” would be even worse, unless that state is the current State of Israel, but that is not the one state Tlaib has in mind. She is calling for an Israeli/Palestinian state that would not be a Jewish State or a homeland for the Jewish people, but a federation in which Palestinians would soon overwhelm Jews demographically. Progressive denial of their rights would soon follow: as I show in my book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, there has never been a majority Muslim nation in which Jews enjoyed equality of rights with Muslims. Tlaib’s unitary state would be no different.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The UK’s Muslim Rape Gangs and Maajid Nawaz’s Hypocrisy The twisted world of the media’s go-to Muslim darling – and ex-terrorist self-promoter. Joshua Winston

Posted By on November 7th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271837/uks-muslim-rape-gangs-and-maajid-nawazs-hypocrisy-joshua-winston

The media’s go-to Muslim darling and ex-terrorist self-promoter, Maajid Nawaz, is currently having a Twitter spat with Lily Allen (that virtuous pop singer who has promised and failed to give a room to even one single asylum seeker in any of her several properties, in spite of breaking down in tears on TV at Calais and apologizing to the world on behalf of the UK).

Maajid is using the usual buzzwords that keep the cash flowing in his direction: “the regressive left,” “Muslim fundamentalists,” and then he ends their debate by stating that Lily is discrediting the work of the three million British Pakistanis who are trying to address and improve the situation of the over-representation of Pakistanis in grooming gangs in the UK. In reality, however, the entire Pakistani community knew, and still knows, about the rape of white British girls. They are a close-knit community. They would have seen gangs of girls hanging around kebab shops. At no point did anyone try on-street intervention. They would have heard their friends bragging about who and how many non-Muslim girls they had raped last night. They would have heard about the rape parties where non-Muslim girls were drugged and passed around the men to be raped. The wives, too, would have heard these conversations on the telephone, in the next room, or in the shops where their husbands work. The taxi drivers who shuttled the non-Muslims girls back and forth to houses and hotels to be raped were also aware of what was going on.

Contrary to Maajid’s claims, none of these three million Pakistani Muslims chose to speak up. A handful of Ahmadiyyas protested on the streets, and the UK media were in a frenzy to let us know that Muslims oppose violence and rape. The media, as usual, neglected to note that Ahmadiyyas are not considered by mainstream Sunni Muslims to be real Muslims. They are considered apostates, who have every chance of being beaten and killed, just the same as any other non-Muslim does. Literature in the Muslim Council of Britain and Kennington mosque declare this sect to be apostates, and essentially fair game.

I remember a radio conversation in which a Muslima was being interviewed and she said that the entire Pakistani communities knew and still know what is going on. She was so sickened and appalled by what her community was doing to non-Muslim girls that she took her infant child and fled, for her safety, and in order that she could speak about it, from the South to the North of England. What a brave soul. A single mother, on her own, running into poverty and uncertainty in order that she could do one single radio interview.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Establishment Media Nixes Trump Ad About Dangerous Caravan Is there really no difference between a house-guest and a burglar? Michael Cutler

Posted By on November 7th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271864/establishment-media-nixes-trump-ad-about-dangerous-michael-cutler

On Monday November 5, 2018, NBC news posted a report, NBC, Fox News pull Trump immigration ad, Facebook blocks paid promotion. The online article included a tweet from Donald Trump, Jr which included a supposedly racist ad.

The article began with these two paragraphs:

NBC and Fox News said on Monday morning that they would no longer air an immigration ad from President Donald Trump that has been widely derided as racially divisive.

“After further review, we recognize the insensitive nature of the ad and have decided to cease airing it across our properties as soon as possible,” said Joe Benarroch, a spokesperson for NBC’s advertising sales department.

The article included this statement:

Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, tweeted that NBC, CNN and Facebook “have chosen to stand” with undocumented immigrants.

By standing with illegal aliens, these “news” organizations that refuse to make a clear distinction between lawful immigrants and illegal aliens have turned their backs on lawful immigrants and have harmed their reputation in the eyes of the American public.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Blue Ripple Democrats seize House, Republicans keep the Senate. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on November 7th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271873/blue-ripple-matthew-vadum

Republicans strengthened their hold on the U.S. Senate last night even as they failed to resist a wave in midterm congressional elections that gave Democrats hellbent on derailing President Trump’s agenda control of the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years.

Barring a revolt in the newly expanded cohort of House Democrats, this means the increasingly frail Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California will return as Speaker of the House. The 116th Congress convenes Jan. 3, 2019.

“Today is more than about Democrats and Republicans, it’s about restoring the Constitution’s checks and balances to the Trump administration,” said the House minority leader.

“It’s about stopping the GOP and Mike—Mitch—McConnell’s assaults on Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the health care of 130 million Americans living with pre-existing medical conditions.”

Then the 78-year-old, who frequently appears confused during public appearances, pumped her fist in the air and strangely remarked, “Let’s hear it more for preexisting medical conditions!”

Pelosi has gone against her party’s base by saying pursuing the impeachment of President Trump is a terrible idea.

A crowd of Republicans and Trump supporters at the Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital were surprisingly conciliatory towards Democrats. They gently booed Pelosi when she appeared on television to make a victory speech but offered polite applause after that when she urged Americans to come together following a hotly contested campaign.

Trump said little about the half-victory in the midterm elections.

“Tremendous success tonight[,]” Trump tweeted Nov. 6 at 11:14 p.m. “Thank you to all!”

Going into Election Day, Republicans held 236 seats, Democrats held 193 seats, and six seats were vacant in the 435-seat House of Representatives. Republicans held 51 seats in the Senate compared to the 49 held by Democrats (including the two seats held by Independents Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine who caucus with the Democrats).

But it now appears Republicans are likely to occupy at least 54 seats in the incoming 100-seat Senate and Democrats will easily exceed the 218-seat threshold needed for House control.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

HIS SAY: JOHN STUART MILL ON LIBERTY AND VOTING 1859

Posted By on November 6th, 2018

A time, however, came in the progress of human affairs, when men ceased to think it a necessity of nature that their governors should be an independent power, opposed in interest to themselves. It appeared to them much better that the various magistrates of the State should be their tenants or delegates, revocable at their pleasure. In that way alone, it seemed, could they have complete security that the powers of government would never be abused to their disadvantage. By degrees, this new demand for elective and temporary rulers became the prominent object of the exertions of the popular party, wherever any such party existed; and superseded, to a considerable extent, the previous efforts to limit the power of rulers.

BOOKS Comments turned off

HEMINGWAY’S JEWISH BULLFIGHTER BY EROL ARAF

Posted By on November 6th, 2018

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Hemingways-Jewish-bullfighter-571011

Nostrils flare dripping with venomous anger, the eyes are big, onyx and lifeless; crimson blood pours from its back consecrating the arena; the front hooves beat the ground relentlessly as dust, sweat and rage hang heavy in the afternoon sun; it snorts and roars with contempt; the head, crowned with piercing horns, is lowered; and the pent-up energy is unleashed with a furious charge at the taunting matador who turns on his axis elegantly to enshroud the incensed bull in his blood red cape as man and beast engage in a choreographed macabre dance of death.

It was at the Pamplona Fiesta in Spain in the 1920s that Hemingway fell in love with the metaphysics of bullfighting, which became a metaphor for his search for meaning and the essence of life and death. The result of this quasi-religious experience was his masterpiece Death in the Afternoon.

Not surprisingly, Hemingway intensely admired Sidney Franklin, a sublime bullfighter, who was born in Brooklyn, New York to Orthodox Jewish parents. Writing in Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway said, “Franklin is brave with a cold, serene and intelligent valor, but instead of being awkward and ignorant, he is one of the most skillful, graceful and slow manipulators of a cape fighting today. His repertoire with the cape is enormous, but he does not attempt by a varied repertoire to escape from the performance of the veronica as the base of his cape work and his veronicas are classical, very emotional, and beautifully timed and executed. You will find no Spaniard who ever saw him fight who will deny his artistry and excellence with the cape.” Hemingway adds, “He is a better, more scientific, more intelligent, and more finished matador than all but about six of the full matadors in Spain today and the bullfighters know it and have the utmost respect for him.”

In his book Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway’s Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin, Paul Bart observes that Death in the Afternoon describes Franklin as having the “ability in languages, the cold courage and the ability to command of the typical soldier of fortune.”

“Yet Franklin wasn’t any kind of soldier,” writes Bart, “resembling instead the womanly Europa in the classical Greek myth where Zeus disguises himself as a bull to rape Europa.” Benjamin Ivry expands on the theme of rape when he writes that Franklin’s bullfighting career was punctuated by genuine violations of his body. In a particularly horrific 1930 episode requiring multiple surgeries, a dying bull’s horn “caught Sidney at the base of his tailbone, plunging into his abdominal cavity through the rectum, piercing the sphincter muscle and large intestine.” Franklin repeatedly risked similar gory disasters long after this 1930 catastrophe.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Citizenship and Choice By Angelo Codevilla

Posted By on November 6th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/05/citizenship-

As caravans of would-be illegal migrants heads for our southern border, each bigger and better organized than the last; as Chinese travel agencies schedule trips to America for mothers-soon-to-be; as the number of births to foreigners and illegals added to the results of chain migration (a.k.a “family reunification”) make up an ever-growing part of the voting public; and as the Democratic Party stakes its future power on importing a new set of Americans it can control, more and more of today’s Americans are realizing that our immigration system since the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 is a political scam.

It is past time we address the question of whom we shall call to join this political enterprise called the United States of America as full members—and why we should be calling them—with the seriousness it deserves. The short answer has to be: that we choose to admit them because they understand, love, and are eager to support what this country is about.

With few exceptions (Indians, descendants of slaves and of the fewer than 3 million who set the country’s character in 1776-89) today’s Americans are people or descendants of people who chose to join this country and its character. Uniquely in history, America has been able to assimilate people of all colors and creeds because these people very much wanted to be assimilated. Many were Americans at heart before they got here. That’s why they came.

My friend, Peter Schramm, recalled his father—realizing that the 1956 revolution against the Soviets was going to fail—telling the family that they would flee to America. Now Peter, who was 10 years old at the time, would have gone anywhere his father asked him to go, but he was confused about why his dad had chosen America, so he asked, “Why America?” His father’s answer is instructive: ““Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place.”