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Europe opting for submission to Islam By Alex Alexiev

Posted By on November 13th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/europe_opting_for_submission_to_islam.html

Two seemingly unrelated events in Europe over the past 20 days point to what cannot be described other than as the slow suicide of European civilization. On November 9, Chancellor Merkel gave a speech in Berlin commemorating the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht (lately renamed Pogromnacht). This 1938 event, which led to the willful destruction of 1400 synagogues, thousands of Jewish stores and the deportation of more than 30,000 Jews to the concentration camps, is widely considered the beginning of the Holocaust. For those familiar with Nazi history, though, the writing had been on the wall long before that.

What Hitler had in mind for the Jews is described in detail in his Mein Kampf and put in practice at the latest by the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which excluded Jews from German society, prohibited them from holding public office and marrying Germans and made them, in effect, stateless outcasts in their own country. As if to make sure that modern Holocaust doubters and anti-Semites, like labor leader Jeremy Corbin of the UK, have no place to hide, Hitler explained in detail his plans to annihilate the Jews to his military commanders in his Obersalzberg speech of August 22, 1939. “Who, after all,” said he, “speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians.”

The gist of Merkel’s speech was less about the commemoration of a dreadful historical event than a warning of the new wave of virulent anti-Semitism washing across Western Europe and assuming pandemic proportions in Muslim diaspora communities. For this, she should be congratulated, though she was less than candid in forgetting to mention that a good part of this explosion of anti-Semitism was caused by her in letting in two million mostly Muslim migrants, who get their anti-Semitism with their mothers milk. Nor did she mention that she had done her level best to perpetuate her awful policies by trying to force Eastern Europe to take migrants who have proven unwilling to integrate. Though Merkel is on her way out, it won’t be long before synagogues and Jewish businesses in Germany will have to be guarded by soldiers, as they already are in France.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Hanging Chads, the Sequel The Democrat who won the 2008 recount for Al Franken is in Florida.

Posted By on November 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hanging-chads-the-sequel-1542068804

Florida’s Secretary of State on Saturday announced statewide recounts in the elections for Senate and Governor, but don’t think this ends the counting if Republicans Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis continue to lead. Democrats have dispatched their prize election litigator Marc Elias to the state, so look for this to go as far as his lawsuits will take them.

After Florida’s 67 counties submitted unofficial results Saturday, Mr. Scott led Democratic Senator Bill Nelson by about 12,600 votes and Mr. DeSantis led Andrew Gillum by some 33,600. Those margins are under 0.5% of total votes cast, triggering an automatic machine recount under Florida law.

This isn’t likely to change the outcome. The nonprofit FairVote—which supports structural voting changes—analyzed 4,687 statewide elections between 2000 and 2015. There were 27 statewide recounts and only three resulted in an election reversal—Democrat Al Franken’s 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, a 2006 auditor race in Vermont, and Washington’s gubernatorial contest in 2004. The recounts resulted in an average change in the margin between the two lead candidates of 282 votes.

Florida’s infamous presidential recount in 2000 backs up these findings. George W. Bush ended election night 1,784 votes ahead of Al Gore. An automatic recount dropped that lead to 327 votes. Even after Democratic shenanigans involving selective hand recounts, Mr. Bush ended with a 537 vote lead. Florida still used punchcard ballots in 2000 while today it mostly uses electronic voting systems.

This explains why Mr. Elias is talking up what he calls an “undervote” in Broward County, a Democratic stronghold where some 25,000 more votes were cast for Governor than for Senate. Mr. Elias claims that a “tabulation” error is denying Mr. Nelson thousands of votes.

The undervote is more likely the result of poor ballot design. The box for the Senate race was on the bottom left corner of Broward ballots, underneath the voting instructions—which may have confused some voters. The Tampa Bay Times reports that MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III found that “the Broward undervoting rate was about the same for early voting, vote by mail and Election Day voting—which would seem to suggest that undervoting should be attributed to humans, not machines.”

Mr. Elias is hoping to turn up enough ballots during the machine recount to hold Mr. Scott within the 0.25% margin necessary to trigger a recount by hand. That would give him the ability to contest the “undervote” ballot by ballot in Democratic strongholds. Mr. Elias said Saturday that a hand recount will cause Mr. Scott’s lead to “evaporate entirely.” This could be hanging chads, the sequel. Mr. Gillum can’t claim a tabulation error to account for his deficit, but he has also withdrawn his election-night concession in hope of his own deus ex Marc Elias.

Mr. Scott has already won two legal judgments requiring election supervisors in Broward and Palm Beach counties to open their vote-counting process to campaign lawyers. This may reduce the chance that they suddenly discover boxes of supposedly uncounted votes, in the Lyndon Johnson tradition. On Monday the Nelson team nonetheless filed a lawsuit demanding that even mail-in ballots that had arrived 10 days after election night be counted.

Florida has given counties until 3 p.m. Thursday to finish the machine recount, and the state needs to insist on that deadline. The longer this stretches on, the more opportunity for mischief, and the less confidence voters will have in the integrity of Florida’s election.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Massive Missile Attack on Israel after Qatar Funds Hamas by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on November 13th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13297/hamas-missiles-qatari-money

The renewed Hamas attacks on Israel serve as a reminder that the terrorist group is not interested in a real truce. Hamas wants millions of dollars paid to its employees so that it can continue to prepare for war with Israel while not having to worry about the welfare of its people.

Qatar’s $15 million cash grant has failed to stop Hamas from launching hundreds of rockets into Israel. On the contrary, the money has only emboldened Hamas and increased its appetite to continue its jihad to eliminate Israel. All the money in the world will not convince Hamas to abandon its ideology or soften its position toward Israel.

What the international mediators need to understand is that there is only one solution to the crisis in the Gaza Strip: removing Hamas from power and destroying its military capabilities. They also need to understand that there is only one language that Hamas understands: the language of force. The assumption that if you pay terrorists millions of dollars, they will stop attacking you — rather than using the funds to build up their forces — has proven to be false.

Last week, as efforts were underway to achieve a new truce between Hamas and Israel, this author asked a legitimate and straightforward question: Can Hamas be trusted?

The conclusion was that a real truce between Israel and Hamas can be achieved only after the Palestinian jihadi terrorists are removed from power, and not rewarded for violence and threats.

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Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World by Claire Lehmann

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/10/camille-paglia-its-time

“I am wholeheartedly in favor of women students or employees knowing their rights and speaking up to defend them. However, the #MeToo movement has gone seriously off track in encouraging uncorroborated accusations dating from ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. No democracy can survive in such a paranoid climate of ambush and summary execution. This is Stalinism, a nadir of politics.” Camille Paglia

I discovered Camille Paglia’s work when I was pursuing my undergraduate arts education at The University of Adelaide, South Australia, in the early 2000s. I was deeply disillusioned with the courses in my arts degree and their monomaniacal focus on social constructionism, and was looking for criticism of Michel Foucault on the internet. I stumbled across a 1991 op-ed written by Paglia for The New York Times, in which she described the followers of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, as “fossilized reactionaries,” and “the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality.” I was hooked.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that my university’s library contained each of her books, including the essay collections Vamps and Tramps and Sex, Art and American Culture. For the final year of my arts degree, (before pursuing my studies in psychology) I spent the bulk of my time at the university reading Paglia in the library. She was like a revelation. Her work was subversive but erudite, and she synthesized insights made in the realm of the arts, ancient history and folk biology—something that no other scholar of the humanities had attempted to do. Thirteen years later, it is an honour to be able to interview Camille Paglia for Quillette.

Paglia is an essayist, author, and professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has taught since 1984. She completed her PhD at Yale under the supervision of Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon. Her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence, from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, was listed by David Bowie as one of “100 books we should all read.”

Her other books include Break, Blow, Burn, a close-reading of 43 classic poems, and Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. In recent years, her essays have been collected and published in new editions, including Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender and Feminism (February 2018) and Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex and Education, which was released by Pantheon in October 2018.

I interviewed Paglia over email for Quillette. What follows is an unedited reproduction of that interview.

* * *

Claire Lehmann: You seem to be one of the only scholars of the humanities who are willing to challenge the post-structuralist status quo. Why have other humanities academics been so spineless in preserving the integrity of their fields?

POLITICS Comments turned off

Broward’s Ballots Voters are right to be suspicious about vote-counting in the Florida By James Freeman county.

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/browards-ballots-1542062920

Continuing irregularities related to voting in Florida’s Broward County have inspired a local judge to require more oversight of the recount of ballots from last Tuesday’s election. But the overseers are unlikely to inspire confidence among voters in south Florida or anywhere else in the United States.

The Miami Herald reports:

A Broward judge on Monday turned down Gov. Rick Scott’s request to “impound and secure” all voting machines in Broward’s elections headquarters when they’re not being used to recount ballots.

But Circuit Judge Jack Tuter offered a compromise: Add three Broward Sheriff’s deputies to the current lineup of [Broward Sheriff’s Office] officers and private security guards overseeing the recount under way at the county’s election’s center in Lauderhill.

Tuter stopped short of granting the Scott campaign’s request for an injunction to impound the machines, but agreed with his lawyers that “there needs to be an additional layer of confidence” in the vote-recount system in Broward. The votes in the U.S. Senate race between Scott and incumbent Bill Nelson are part of the recount.

The judge is correct about a lack of confidence that Broward officials will conduct a fair and competent count. A Journal editorial on Saturday summarized the jurisdiction’s disturbing recent history of legal violations. This morning Politico’s Marc Caputo wrote that a change in leadership is imminent:

Counting unlawful votes. Destroying ballots. Sunshine Law violations. Busted deadlines.

So many controversies have bedeviled Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes — culminating in her office’s troubles in the aftermath of Florida’s chaotic 2018 elections — that her days in office are now numbered, insiders and lawmakers say.

She’s losing support from fellow Democrats and faces the increasing likelihood of an embarrassing suspension from office at the hands of either Gov. Rick Scott or his likely successor, Ron DeSantis.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel, Gaza Militants Exchange Heavy Fire After Raid Goes Awry Escalating hostilities following military operation in territory threaten to upend fragile cease-fire talks with Hamas By Dov Lieber

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-seek-calm-after-gaza-raid-goes-awry-1542033474

TEL AVIV—Israel’s military and Gaza militant groups exchanged heavy fire in an escalation of hostilities that threatened to upend fragile cease-fire talks that had been gaining momentum.

Israel said Hamas and other militant groups fired more than 300 rockets at Israel on Monday in what is the largest barrage aimed at the Jewish state from the Gaza Strip since their war in 2014. The militants said they were responding to an Israeli operation Sunday night in Gaza that left seven Palestinian militants and an Israeli military officer dead.

At least one Israeli was seriously injured on Monday when an antitank missile fired from Gaza struck a bus near the border, Israeli paramedics said, and at least 10 others were lightly injured by shrapnel in or near the Israeli town of Sderot. Homes in the Israeli towns of Ashkelon and Netivot took direct hits from rocket fire, according to videos shown on Israel’s public broadcaster Kan.

In response to the rocket fire, the Israeli military said it carried out 70 airstrikes against military targets in Gaza, including the building that housed Hamas’s Al Aqsa TV station, an official media arm of the militant group. Israel accused the outlet of directing terror activities against it.

The strikes killed at least three Palestinians and injured nine others, the Gaza Health Ministry said. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an armed group, said two of the dead were their members, and Islamic Jihad, also an armed group, said one of the dead belonged to it.

The attacks were the most intense fighting in weeks on the Gaza border, following a period of calm that coincided with stepped-up peace talks between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza, mediated by Egypt and the United Nations. After months of worsening restrictions on Gaza, Israel had begun allowing humanitarian aid from Qatar to flow in, easing conditions there.

The relative quiet was broken Sunday night by what Israel described as an intelligence-gathering mission gone wrong.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Tale of Two Migrants by Mark Steyn

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

https://www.steynonline.com/8990/a-tale-of-two-migrantshttps://www.steynonline.com/8990/a-tale-of-two-migrants

There was a terrorist attack in Melbourne on Friday. I believe it’s the fifth, publicly speaking, but I gather there’s also a sixth one that’s sub judice. An excitable fellow blew up his Holden Rodeo ute (that’s “SUV” in American) on busy, crowded Bourke Street, a couple of blocks from Victoria’s parliament. It unfortunately didn’t cause quite the mass slaughter he’d been looking forward to when he loaded it up with gas bottles. So he staggered from the flaming vehicle, and a pedestrian, assuming the car detonation had been an accident, went to the driver’s aid. And thus two migrants to the Lucky Country briefly came face to face:

‘Melbourne is mourning one of the founders of the city’s famous coffee culture after the murder of Sisto Malaspina in Bourke Street’s terror attack yesterday…

‘It is believed Mr Malaspina had gone to the aid of the attacker after his car blew up.’

And as Tim Blair adds:

Of course he did. And of course the jihadi stabbed him to death for it.

Of course. Because, as London’s mayor Sadiq Khan, has assured us, this is just part and parcel of what it means to live in a big vibrant metropolis in the early twenty-first century. On the one hand, you get a hardworking gregarious immigrant who creates an iconic coffee bar that becomes part of the fabric of city life – and, on the other, you get a different type of immigrant who kills the first guy. Tim Blair again:

Sisto Malaspina arrived in Australia from Italy, and for more than 40 years ran Melbourne’s wonderful Pellegrini’s restaurant. Hassan Khalif Shire Ali arrived from Somalia, and did rather less with his life.

Pellegrini’s had the first espresso machine in Melbourne, and my recollection is that Mr Malaspina’s staff know how to use it to far greater effect than, say, the lads at Starbucks do theirs. By contrast, Hassan Khalif Sire Ali’s talents lay elsewhere: He was linked via “social media” to his “fellow Australian” and serial decapitator Khaled Sharrouf. He had his passport canceled when he attempted to leave the country to fight for Isis in 2015. Because the Australian Government’s policy is to keep all the jihadists at home so the only infidels they can kill are the locals.

Many Aussie readers have written to me about Friday’s events and, “of course”, the dishonesty and evasions of the media. The fact that Sisto Malaspina was the proprietor of a Melbourne institution has enabled the press to talk about how beloved he was and how his granddaughter had been born just six days earlier – instead of how he didn’t deserve to die, and his week-old granddaughter doesn’t deserve to grow up without a grandfather, and her parents don’t deserve to have the joy of her birth tainted and bloodied by his murder, because of lunatic government policies that insist everybody on the planet is entirely the same and that to attempt to distinguish between any of the seven billion potential immigrants to your country is totally racist.

BOOKS Comments turned off

“Burrowing into Books – The Thirty-One Kings” Sydney M. Williams

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“As the sun slanted toward the west, the cries of plovers and curlews echoed off the hills

and the breeze carried a tang of burning peat from the hearth of a far-off cottage.”

Robert Harris

The Thirty-one Kings

Richard Hannay was the creation of John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir as he became known. Buchan was born in Scotland in 1875. He was a product of a time when chivalry was a powerful force, when war was viewed heroically, before the slaughter at the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele and Meuse Argonne. Buchan was a novelist, historian and politician who was serving as Governor General of Canada at the time of his death in 1940. Hannay, his character, is a Scotsman who bears the traits of a Victorian gentleman. During the Great War, Mr. Buchan wrote three novels in which Richard Hannay appeared:The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle(1916), and Mr. Standfast(1918). Two more Hannay novels were published after the War:The Three Hostages(1924) and The Island of Sheep(1936). In a posthumously published novel, Sick Heart River (1941),Buchan predicted that Hannay and his friends would be going back into action, as clouds of war descended over Europe. Mr. Harris has provided that opportunity. Readers of a certain age will recall those novels, along with the Alfred Hitchcock 1935 movie, “The Thirty-Nine Steps”starring Robert Donat. The book has never been out of print.

Robert Harris was asked by Polygon, which currently publishes Buchan’s books, to create a new series. The Thirty-one Kingsis the first. Like Buchan, Harris is a Scotsman, a graduate of St. Andrews, a classicist, historian, popular author and designer of the fantasy board and digital game “Talisman.” The rubric at the top of the page indicates how closely he mimics John Buchan.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Phony War? by: Diana West

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3799/The-Phony-War.aspx

Returning from a few days away, I find several emails alerting me to a recent pronouncement by David Horowitz on his supposed rift with Ronald Radosh.

Supposed…?

Truth be told, every time I happen to write either of those two names, I stop, halted by misgivings over wasted time and thought. Why throw any more of either at these two longtime prevaricators now pretending to be at odds?

Pretending…?

It’s just a notion, but I think it has some appeal. If only to avoid thinking about the midterm elections now in progress (Vote GOP!), I’ll tease it out for a bit. Maybe there’s something there.

Background (there’s always background): On August 18, 2017, FP appeared to cast Radosh out of its orbit in a curious article by Daniel Greenfield. The headline, likely by Horowitz, was: “NEVER TRUMP DRIVES A FORMER COMMUNIST BACK TO HIS ROOTS: What happens when you lose every principle except hating Trump.”

The average reader surely expects that the “roots” to which “former Communist” Radosh is alleged to be returning are Communism. What else? Reading the headline and then skimming the article the first time around, I remember getting the feeling the piece came up short. Forcing myself through a second time, I find the “roots” Radosh is “returning” to are “McCarthyism accusations.”

McCarthyism accusations?

Guess what, gang? Radosh never left those roots. I know. In 2013, at FP, Radosh dubbed me “McCarthy’s heiress,” and Horowitz called American Betrayal “McCarthyism on Steroids.” (Quote Horowitz: “She should not have written that book.”)

So, who are they trying to kid? You. Everyone. They return to “McCarthyism” when it suits them, ho hum, and then pretend it’s a big deal to return to “McCarthyism” when it suits them, woo woo.

Thus, to underscore, the 2017 FP piece does not accuse Radosh of returning to Communism — or even to the Left. The point Greenfield makes is that Radosh, as a “Never Trumper,” has no beliefs, just spite and malice against Trump.

In FP’s telling, then, it is just as if Donald Trump were not the counter-revolutionary figure that he is, and that Never Trump and its allies in the so-called Resistance were not attempting to save the Revolution from his mighty, providential assault.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Asabiyah…Or, Another Prolonged Wandering In The Desert? by Gerald A. Honigman

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

http://www.geraldahonigman.com/blog/
Spend some time on many-to-most university campuses these days; read or listen to numerous Jewish commentators and editorialists in the mainstream media dealing with Israel and the Middle East.

With rare exceptions, you’ll be hard pressed finding Jews (let alone others) who have not succumbed to the pressure to adopt one set of standards by which Israel and Zionism is studied and judged, and another entirely different set by which the rest of the Middle East and North Africa—indeed, the rest of the world–is scrutinized.

Frequently, Jewish organizations (J Street U, Jewish Voice For Peace, and too many others–including Hillel, at times) are prominent, or at least collaborative, in partaking in the one-sided Israel and Zionism-bashing goings on of other groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Students Association, radical Leftists, and so forth https://ekurd.net/students-justice-palestine-2018-07-05.

While starry-eyed, naïve students learn about the admittedly imperfect quest of Jews to cast off their millennial victim, scapegoat, and whipping post status, they’ll neither hear nor read anything about the plights of scores of millions of other non-Arab peoples in the region. They won’t find, for example, a local chapter of Students for Justice in Kurdistan or for the Kabyle or Amazigh (Berber”) people, whose programs they can attend. And they won’t find a post-Zionist, “Progressive” Hebrew or other professor mentioning anything about them either https://kabylia.wordpress.com/2017/09/19/berber-autumn/.