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Ben Weingarten: Why Is Khashoggi Being Made The Defining Issue Of U.S. Foreign Policy? The alleged killing of Jamal Khashoggi reveals far more about the nature of the American press and political establishment than it does foreign policy.

Posted By on October 20th, 2018

https://thefederalist.com/2018/10/19/khashoggi-made-defining-issue-u-s-foreign-policy/

Why has the media and much of the political establishment made the presumed murder of an Islamist Saudi dissident on Turkish soil a defining issue in American foreign policy?

Jamal Khashoggi is not a U.S. citizen, despite his past residence in Virginia, nor is he a lover of liberty, despite his criticism of Saudi Arabia’s despotic regime. He previously served that regime as a mouthpiece for, and adviser to, the alleged al-Qaeda-tied Saudi intelligence leader Turki bin Faisal. Khashoggi mourned the death of Osama bin Laden, whom Khashoggi had been granted unusual levels of access for numerous interviews. Khashoggi was also an ardent proponent of political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Needless to say, one wonders why Khashoggi was permitted to enter the United States and handed a column at The Washington Post given this background, particularly at a time our media claims acute sensitivity to foreign influence. One also wonders why so many in the media are quick to fawn over such a figure given his regressive views.

This is not to dismiss Khashoggi’s alleged gory assassination at the hands of his supposed Saudi captors by characteristically sketchy unnamed Turkish sources. If Mohammad bin Salman’s regime did execute this grisly murder, risking all the capital it had accrued in the West to send a signal to its political opposition, it should have to deal with the consequences.

But surely our media and political establishment are not blind to the brutality and censorship that characterizes the regimes of the Islamic world, whether in Riyadh, Ankara, or Tehran. Nor are they deaf to the proxy war taking place in any of a number of theaters with Iran, intense jockeying for relations with the Trump administration and much else that divides Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab nations like Egypt and the United Arab Emirates on the one hand, and Turkey and Qatar on the other.
3 Reasons Khashoggi Is Suddenly a BFD

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UK: Anjem Choudary Released from Prison by Soeren Kern

Posted By on October 20th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13145/uk-anjem-choudary-released-from-prison

“I believe we are underestimating the potency and danger of the radicalizers who don’t carry knives, guns and overtly plot terrorist attacks but who pollute the minds of young Muslim men.” — Richard Walton, former head of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command

“I asked the guy who spoke to him if the de-radicalization program had worked and he said, ‘No, he’s got worse. He’s hardened. He speaks in the mind-set of the victim. He sees himself as a martyr the state tried to silence.'” — Fiyaz Mughal, head of the anti-extremist group Faith Matters

Choudary is now considering mounting a legal challenge to the strict conditions of his release, according to the Telegraph. It reported that he has applied for legal aid funding, at taxpayer expense, to bring his action against government ministers, and arguing the parole conditions breach his human rights.

The Islamist firebrand preacher Anjem Choudary, described as Britain’s “most dangerous extremist,” has been released from prison after serving only half of the five-and-a-half-year sentence he received in 2016 for pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.

Prison authorities could not prevent his release: under British sentencing guidelines, prisoners — even those who are still a risk to the public — automatically become eligible for release under license (parole) after serving half their terms.

Prime Minister Theresa May has downplayed concerns over Choudary’s release; British counter-terrorism authorities, however, say they are worried that he will re-exert influence on hundreds of followers upon his release. The cost to British taxpayers of keeping Choudary under surveillance is expected to exceed £2 million (€2.25 million; $2.6 million) a year, compared to the £50,000 (€57,000; $65,000) to keep him in prison.

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Britain’s Grooming Gangs: Part 1 by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on October 20th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13075/britain-grooming-gangs

As far back as 2013, Britain’s Attorney General stated in the House of Lords that 27 police forces were then investigating no fewer than 54 alleged gangs involved in child sexual grooming.

Last year, Shahid Javed Burki, a former Pakistani finance minister and vice-president of the World Bank, spoke out about the treatment of women in his country, arguing that the low status given to women has had serious social, demographic, educational, and financial effects.

This problem is, in some measure, reflected in the UK, where Muslim women (mainly of Pakistani origin) face limitations on their participation in the workplace, in higher education, and even knowledge of the English language — matters examined by Dame Louise Casey in her 2016 government review into opportunity and integration.

Bringing Pakistani attitudes into the UK, often within segregated communities, only serves to perpetuate the belief that women are intrinsically the inferiors of men in all respects.

On July 24, 2018, Britain’s Home Secretary, conservative MP Sajid Javid, issued orders for research into the ethnic origins of the country’s many sexual grooming gangs that had involved large numbers of loosely-termed “Asian men”, who, over many years, had taken vulnerable young white British girls to use or pass on for sexual purposes. Most of the men have, Javid has stated been of Pakistani extraction, which makes the Home Secretary’s intervention significant. Javid’s father came, as did many other Pakistani immigrants, from Punjab, and with only £1 to his name. He became a bus driver, then a clothing store owner. Yet his five sons have all become fully integrated Britons, with successful careers in business, politics and the public sector. They are all models of second-generation immigrant achievement, miles away from the men in the gangs. Reporting on the Javid family, The Times wrote:

MEDIA, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Stick To Fashion Teen Vogue, And Shut Up About Politics By aggressively politicizing fashion, Teen Vogue is furthering one of the most destructive trends in our culture.By Inez Feltscher Stepman

Posted By on October 20th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/19/stick-to-fashion-teen-vogue-and-shut-up-about-politics/

Teen Vogue, publisher of groundbreaking, age-appropriate material like anal sex manuals for both “prostate owners” and “non-prostate owners” alike, has stepped into the political arena once again with an article about the alleged failures of capitalism.

“Can’t #endpoverty without ending capitalism,” the magazine tweeted on Wednesday, with a link to a poorly-written diatribe that reads like a B student’s Marxism 101 paper and gets key historical facts wrong. Absent from writer Kim Kelly’s excoriation of the system that has brought the world out of grinding poverty is the fact that her screed was published in a fashion magazine, which is supposed to fill its pages chronicling the trends of an industry of excess that owes its existence to the tremendous wealth capitalism has created.

Meanwhile, socialist paradise Venezuela is succumbing to what increasingly seems to be an ironclad rule of left-wing economics: they’ve run out of toilet paper. Of course, the leader of the workers’ paradise isn’t going on the same crash diet that caused the people of Venezuela to lose an average of 24 pounds last year (“10 ways to lose 20 lbs: 1. Communism”). President Nicolas Maduro was recently spotted living the Michelin star-studded capitalist life with a Miami celebrity chef known as “Salt Bae.”

While it’s easy (and let’s face it, kind of fun) to tear Teen Vogue’s pop Communism apart on the merits, the relentless politicization of all spaces in public and private life is exhausting and dangerous. When top Democrats refuse to condemn — and sometimes encourage — mob violence against Republicans, calls for civility are falling on deaf ears in a political environment where left and right seem polarized even on the most foundational principles.

With the threat of political violence and civil unrest bubbling in the background, it’s even more critical that people of different political tribes connect with each other as friends, family and fellow citizens. When politics are front and center in every interaction, Americans are deprived of the ability to connect as everyday human beings — as sports fans, Netflix bingers, and yes, fashionistas.

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Democrat Strategy of Crying Rape Is Not Over By Karin McQuillan

Posted By on October 20th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/19/the-democrat-strategy

Brett Kavanaugh’s televised trial by ordeal may be over, but Democrats will never let go of the falsehood that Republicans have elevated a would-be or actual rapist to the Supreme Court. Neither have we heard the last rape accusation deployed as political weapon. Think of the Kavanaugh hearings as the trailer for the Democratic horror movie to come.

And don’t be surprised if we haven’t heard the last of sexual misconduct smears against Justice Kavanaugh stemming from his college days at Yale. If the Democrats take the House in the midterms, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) would be chairman of the judiciary committee, and he has vowed to pursue the accusations of sexual assault against the newest Supreme Court Justice.

At first glance this seems self-destructive on the part of Democrats, given how the general public hated the cruel and lawless attack on Kavanaugh. Democrats have a different calculus. Abortion with no limits is threatened. There is a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, so the court itself must be besmirched.

What is becoming more obvious by the day is that the Democrats don’t care about the general electorate. They appear bent on destroying unity wherever they find it. They want to destroy constitutional limits on their power, including the limits brought on by separation of powers or Democrats losing elections.

The newly radicalized Democratic Party has priorities that follow a neo-Marxist identity politics playbook. Their future depends on whipping up emotions of fear and anger and dividing the country into warring factions. Success requires that women become a one-party voting bloc, joining blacks who have long been corralled into a near-permanent voting bloc (now finally cracking) by cries of racism and attacks on dissenters as race traitors if they dare break free.

Democrats need American suburban women—educated, prosperous, assertive, successful American women—to feel like victims. President Obama’s Title IX Office of Civil Rights redefined sexual assault to be any unwanted words or touch. Their directive explicitly states, the action does not need be “objectionably offensive” to an “objectively reasonable person.” Assault is defined in the mind of the accuser.

Since every woman in America has received an unwanted catcall or pat, an obnoxious grope or innuendo, everyone is a “survivor.” No surprise, the villains are “white men,” shorthand for “evil racist, sexist Republicans.”

Putting on the mantle of “survivor” appeals to the drama queens of Hollywood. It is second nature to the feminists of the coastal elites. It plays well in the wealthy enclaves that fund the Democrat party.

POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: ILLINOIS DISTRICT 6: A House Majority by ‘Any Means Necessary’ A Democratic challenger with a smash-mouth style seeks to flip a suburban Illinois district Hillary Clinton carried in 2016.By Kyle Peterson

Posted By on October 20th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-house-majority-by-any-means-necessary-1539989212

Ask Sean Casten about the sharp tone of his congressional campaign, and he responds by going for the jugular. In a bellwether race as Democrats try to take the House, Mr. Casten has been accused by his opponent, six-term GOP Rep. Peter Roskam, of spraying “rhetorical gasoline” and “parroting Donald Trump.” Nonsense, replies the Democratic challenger.

“If you don’t have a thick skin, I’m not sure why you’re in politics,” Mr. Casten says, after we duck into a quiet corner during an office-park meet-and-greet. “What Roskam is offended by is that I’ve had the temerity to speak truth to power. He’s voted 94% of the time with Trump. He has on his website that he is proud to work at Denny Hastert’s desk. I’m opposed to pedophilia. If that bothers him, that’s between him and his God.”

Say what?

To back up a smidge: Mr. Casten is referring to an old press release, from 2011, on Mr. Roskam’s official website. It explained that Dennis Hastert, who served as House speaker from 1999-2007, was passing down a “historic desk” used by Illinois congressmen since the 1940s. Five years after bequeathing the antique, Mr. Hastert admitted he had sexually abused boys as a high-school wrestling coach in the 1960s and ’70s. And this horrifying crime now reflects on Mr. Roskam . . . how, exactly?

Welcome to Illinois’s Sixth Congressional District, where the political debate this year is peppered with casual references to Nazis, morons and, yes, pedophiles. These Chicagoland suburbs, which went for Hillary Clinton by 7 points in 2016, are a prime pickup opportunity for Democrats. The district, shaped like a cocktail shrimp, arcs between O’Hare Airport and the particle accelerator at Fermilab. Half of adult residents went to college, one-fifth have a graduate degree, and the median household earns $99,000.

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Shedding Humanity, Shredding the Humanities Anthony Esolen

Posted By on October 19th, 2018

https://www.nas.org/articles/shedding_humanity_shredding_the_humanities

An incident from my final year teaching at Providence College, now roiled by what has been called “identity politics,” stands for me as an example of how that new monster of man’s morbid imagination has made real education in the humanities and the very notion of a common good nearly inconceivable.

A young freshman from Colombia was among a group of students who took offense at my suggesting, in an article written online for conservative Roman Catholics, that the cult of diversity, defined by a stark political monotone and divorced from interest in actual human cultures, was self-contradictory. I called out the diversitarians for their frankly expressed desire to transform the somewhat Catholic Providence College into a secular place like pretty much every other, and noted that this desire was especially visible in the college’s apparent longing to join those other secular colleges in that land of sexual indifference over the rainbow.

I am not going to argue about that article here. The student did not want to argue about it, either. He and other students went straight to the president’s office to demand that I be fired. Of course that was not going to happen. I had tenure. Peter Singer, the philosopher of ethics at Princeton, does not get fired for recommending the murder of lebensunwerte Leben, a baby here and a baby there. I was not going to get fired for saying that people ought to learn about other cultures before they call themselves “multicultural,” as fearful as such learning might be.

I found out about the student, who was enrolled in my section of the college’s team-taught program in the development of Western Civilization. I wanted to talk to him about what a culture is, why we study them, and what he might be reading with us in the spring if he stayed with the team. We would be taking a good look at the golden age of Spain, and reading, in a bilingual edition, a work by her greatest playwright, Pedro Calderon de la Barca. But he shook his head and muttered, “It’s still European.” And there you have it. Calderon is an artist of the first rank, working at the end of the most glorious period of dramatic flourishing in the history of the world, but because he was European and not Colombian, or just because he was European and not something or anything else, he meant nothing to this young man. It did not matter that Spanish was the student’s mother tongue and not mine. I was passionately interested in reading La Vida es Sueno in the original early modern Spanish, and he was not. That alone did not of course distinguish him from his fellow students, who are not known to be eager to venture forth into lands and times far distant from theirs. But some of them at least might be capable of catching the fire of the venture, whereas politics had cast a cold frost upon his mind and soul.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Srdja Trifkovic : Trump vs. the EU again

Posted By on October 19th, 2018

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/trump-vs-the-eu-again
In his latest interview with Radio Sputnik International, Srdja Trifkovic discusses President Donald Trump’s recent statement on CBS that the EU was formed to take advantage of the United States and that’s what it has been doing to this day. The first question was whether Trump’s assertion about the EU’s early days was accurate. [Audio]

ST: If you’re looking at the early days, [the European Union] started as the European Coal and Steel Community. Its primary purpose was to facilitate the movement of goods and services within the core of six original countries. This was done with the explicit blessing of the United States, of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, back in the early 1950’s.

If we’re looking at the establishment of the European Union as it exists in its present form, specifically since the Lisbon Treaty was signed and when the current EU institutional framework was created, then there may be some truth to [President Trump’s statement]. In reality the EU has behaved over the past two decades like a trading block ready and willing to take advantage of the very open U.S. market, while inserting all sorts of subtle—or not so subtle—protectionist clauses into its own trading practices.

We need to bear in mind that very often European products have an in-built subsidy which is not directly visible. It is not like a subsidy that goes straight to the manufacturer or to the farmer! It goes via circuitous routes. Very often it’s hard to tell the percentage of built-in subsidies from Brussels which have found a way—for instance, through the French Ministry of Agriculture—but coming from European funds, and making French cheese more competitive than it otherwise would have been.

Q: In the summer the United States and the EU agreed to tone down the trade dispute, after a meeting in the White House between Jean-Claude Juncker and President Donald Trump; but what do you make of Trump’s latest comments about the EU hostility towards the U.S. and what message does this send out?

ST: First of all . . . when it comes to Jean-Claude Juncker, the question is whether he has had his morning libation before the meeting. Personal chemistry works better depending on M. Juncker’s level of inebriation. But seriously speaking . . . Trump has always had a certain Eurosceptic view well in line with his sovereignist principles. During the election campaign, he did make skeptical statements and he even received Nigel Farage of UKIP in Washington . . .

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Peter Smith Blinded by ‘Science’

Posted By on October 19th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/10/blinded-science/

Reputable scientists start afresh when their theories clash with experience. Not the climate careerists preaching planetary doom, who have just released yet another fires-and-floods prophecy. This lot adhere to Groucho’s maxim: when predictions don’t work out, they have others.

Don’t ask me any questions, but the wavelength of light emanating from an object increases in wavelength if the object is moving away at speed. This is called redshift, I understand. Apparently, it is the observations of this redshift from distant galaxies that has convinced most scientist that the universe is expanding and at an ever-faster rate – thwarting gravity. How to explain it? Well they couldn’t. So, out of thin air, so to speak, to push galaxies apart, they simply invented a mysterious and invisible substance which they call ‘dark energy’. And this ain’t small beer. It is hypothesised to make up almost 70% of all of the energy in the universe.

A group of scientists in Bilboa, Spain, has come up with another explanation of redshift which is that time is slowing down.[i] Now this makes no sense to me personally because my life seems to be running out at an increasing rate. Nevertheless, I will come up with a scientific explanation for time slowing which is that the universe is indeed collapsing on itself as a result of gravity and everyone knows that time slows as the density of matter increases. Or at least I think that’s right because time slows to zero at (or is it just beyond) the event horizon of black holes, which are extremely dense. I don’t expect a Nobel Prize for this brilliant insight, but am quite taken with it and will fly to Sweden if invited.

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A Clash of Judicial Visions By John Yoo & James C. Phillips

Posted By on October 19th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/supreme-court-judicial-philosophy-constitutional-system/

Defining the proper role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system

Editor’s Note: The following is the first in a series of articles in which Mr. Yoo and Mr. Phillips will lay out a course of constitutional restoration, pointing out areas where the Supreme Court has driven the Constitution off its rails and the ways the current Court can put it back on track.

The end of the sordid ordeal that led to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation provides conservatives the opportunity to think deeply about what they want from the Supreme Court. Conservatives, of course, would have fought for Kavanaugh whether he was a stalwart Clarence Thomas or a wandering Anthony Kennedy. At stake were the principles of fairness and due process that should guide all of our institutions, even when they intersect with the #MeToo movement’s claims. The courts, Congress, federal agencies, state governments, and even the most delusional of our great societal institutions — the media and our colleges and universities — must not banish facts, proof, and the right to be heard.

But now that Justice Kavanaugh has assumed his seat on the Court, conservatives can take a step back and consider their agenda for the future. Democrats launched their scorched-earth war against Kavanaugh, an outstanding judge and distinguished public servant, precisely because his appointment promised a reliable fifth vote for a conservative majority. There’s a good argument to be made that conservatives have not had such a working majority on the Court since 1936. Even though Republican presidents have appointed the majority of justices since 1968, when Richard Nixon won on a law-and-order platform, their appointments have often “grown in office” and drifted leftwards. But the outrageousness of Democratic attacks on Justice Kavanaugh should guarantee that he will not follow in the path of Republican-appointed Justices such as Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and David Souter, who became lions of the Left.

The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to reconsider doctrines at odds with the Constitution’s original meaning. Before they devolved into an ugly political and personal brawl, Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings revealed, among other things, the fault lines in American constitutional politics.

Democratic senators, as well as their expert witnesses called in opposition, advanced a view of a judge as simply the enabler of a political party’s policy preferences. They cross-examined Judge Kavanaugh on the specific outcomes he had reached in cases relating to certain groups of interest: minorities, women, environmental organizations, and the like. In their view, the only difference between a judge and a congressman is the former wears a robe.