NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anatomy of a Fusion Smear Democrats and their media friends made false claims about a lawyer.

Posted By on September 1st, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anatomy-of-a-fusion-smear-1535757026

Cleta Mitchell is a top campaign-finance lawyer in Washington, D.C. This year she’s also been the target of a political and media smear that reveals some of the nastiness at work in the allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

A partner at Foley & Lardner, Ms. Mitchell was astonished to find herself dragged into the Russia investigation on March 13 when Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee issued an interim report. They wrote that they still wanted to interview “key witnesses,” including Ms. Mitchell, who they claimed was “involved in or may have knowledge of third-party political outreach from the Kremlin to the Trump campaign, including persons linked to the National Rifle Association (NRA).”

Two days later the McClatchy news service published a story with the headline “NRA lawyer expressed concerns about group’s Russia ties, investigators told.” The story cited two anonymous sources claiming Congress was investigating Ms. Mitchell’s worries that the NRA had been “channeling Russia funds into the 2016 elections to help Donald Trump.”

Ms. Mitchell says none of this is true. She hadn’t done legal work for the NRA in at least a decade, had zero contact with it in 2016, and had spoken to no one about its actions. She says she told this to McClatchy, which published the story anyway.

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Off The Shelf: Seasons Change By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Posted By on September 1st, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/book-review-the-russian-revolution-revisionist-history-sean-mcmeekin/

EXCERPT

Some observations about the Russian Revolution, and about Sean McMeekin’s new revisionist history of it.

Editor’s Note: Every week, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes an “Off the Shelf” column sharing casual observations on the books he’s reading and the passing scene.

“…….Luckily, in the midst of all this, I assigned myself the utterly light reading of Sean McMeekin’s blockbuster revisionist history, The Russian Revolution. Actually, I’m not even kidding. Compared with the history books I was reading in earlier editions of this column, the death counts in this one were much lower. Fewer long descriptions of mass torture; Stalin is not yet in full flower in this volume, which follows in the tradition of Richard Pipes’s history of the same. McMeekin’s book, however, does more to locate Lenin’s success as due to the assistance and wishes of Germany.

I was raised in an era where Communism was largely detested and laughed at even on the left. By the time I got to Bard College (where McMeekin teaches now), the presence at the school of an Alger Hiss Chair of Social Science was kind of a joke among the politically aware on campus. In fact, I still have a hard time taking McMeekin’s conclusory warnings against radical socialism and Communism seriously precisely because it all seemed so obviously discredited in my life, even in places that vestigially venerated Alger Hiss. Still, I’m grateful for McMeekin’s work, which corrects the dim and entirely incomplete picture of the Russian Revolution given to me in my high-school education.

McMeekin is very helpful in making observations about the state of pre-revolutionary Russia:

The strength and also the weakness of autocracy was that there were few intermediary institutions between the tsar and his subjects to absorb and dampen popular frustrations. Labor unions were illegal. There was no national parliament to focus the government’s attention on social problems. In the brief era of liberal concessions that had followed Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War (1853–1856), Tsar Alexander II had allowed the creation of small provincial assemblies known as zemstvos in 1864, but their power had been substantially curtailed by his more conservative successor, Alexander III, in 1890, when the zemstvo councils were subordinated to regional governors appointed by the tsar.

Pre-revolutionary Russia was also shocked by its embarrassing showing in a war with Japan in 1905, a conflict that began in divergent interests and could even be said to have made a permanent mark on Tsar Nicholas II, in the form of a three-and-a-half-inch scar, given to him in all the way back in 1891 when a Japanese police escort lunged at him with his saber.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The inevitability of Fortress Europe R.W. JOHNSON

Posted By on August 31st, 2018

http://standpointmag.co.uk/features-september-2018-rw-johnson-the-inevitability-of-fortress-europe-migration
Watching European attempts to come to terms with the problem of migrants from the Third World is to watch a slow-motion train crash. All manner of liberal nostrums about the duty to accept refugees, the right to free movement within the EU and even the notion of a secular indifference to religious distinctions are all being tested to destruction. There seems only one possible conclusion: a Fortress Europe with distinct echoes from its past as Christendom. This may not be what Europe’s elites would choose but popular pressure seems unlikely to allow anything else.

It has often been argued that the reason for the barbarian invasions which ended the Roman Empire lay in climatic changes in Central Asia producing famine conditions which propelled vast population movements westward. Today’s crisis lies in similarly profound events far from Europe which one could sum up as the failure of Third World nationalisms. These arose several generations ago under leaders such as Nasser and Nkrumah, with a promise to modernise and democratise the Middle East and Africa. This promise failed, for it is notoriously difficult to leapfrog the long historical development which has produced democratic modernity in Europe. The result in the Middle East was that although the Arab nationalists swept away the last kings — Farouk of Egypt in 1952, Muhammad VIII of Tunisia in 1957, Faisal II of Iraq in 1958 and Idris of Libya in 1969 — their successors turned out to be even more tyrannical and just as incapable of modernising their countries. One after another these regimes foundered in social unrest or civil war.

The story of African nationalism has been somewhat similar though the complication here is the huge demographic surge which will over the next generation add an extra billion Africans. There is simply no way that Africa’s shaky economies and polities can produce the housing, education and jobs required to meet that surge. The result will be large movements of population towards Europe — and these will be opportunistically joined by Afghans, Pakistanis and others. In other words, what we have seen to date is merely the first trickle of a developing flood. Without doubt all these migrants will claim to be refugees.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Israel needs its new nation-state law Jonathan Neumann

Posted By on August 31st, 2018

http://standpointmag.co.uk/features-september-2018-jonathan-neumann-jeremy-corbyn-antisemitism

Benjamin Netanyahu and Jeremy Corbyn don’t have a great deal in common. But one thing they do share is recognition that the essential character of the State of Israel is its Jewishness. They offer, however, opposing responses to this fundamental. For Netanyahu and the Zionist movement, Israel’s Jewishness is something to affirm and celebrate; for Corbyn and his allies, it represents Israel’s intrinsic evil and it is the reason they are fixated on this tiny plot of land.

Netanyahu’s position was articulated by a law recently passed by his government — a law that Corbyn opposes — that defines Israel as a Jewish State, the expression of the self-determination of the Jewish People. This legislation has provoked a negative reaction both in Israel and around the world. But to appreciate the nuances and significance of that reaction and the position of the Labour leader, one must first understand the provenance and purpose of the law.

The nation-state law was originally introduced as a Knesset bill in 2011 by a member of the centrist Kadima Party, which at the time was led by Tzipi Livni (now the leader of the Opposition and, rather cynically, a critic of the law), and had support from parts of the Israeli Left. The draft legislation went through various iterations and was debated by successive governments, and indeed was watered down from earlier versions, before being passed as a Basic Law in July of this year.

What is a Basic Law? Israel has no constitution. The State’s founders expected one to be written, but it has yet to materialise, due to disagreement over the content and even desirability of such a document. Instead, the Knesset has over the years passed a series of Basic Laws, which are designed to function as clauses of the eventual constitution. Most of them legislate how the Knesset and other branches of the state are to operate. Some Basic Laws are more than functional, however: one, passed in 1980, annexed the eastern portion of Jerusalem; another, passed a few years ago, requires a large Knesset majority or a national referendum on the surrender of any annexed territory.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Police Report: Beto O’Rourke Tried to Flee Scene of Drunk-Driving Crash By Jack Crowe

Posted By on August 31st, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/beto-orourke-tried-to-flee-scene-drunk-driving-crash/

It has long been a matter of public record that Beto O’Rourke was arrested for driving while intoxicated in 1998, but a police report recently obtained by the Houston Chronicle reveals that the Democratic Senate candidate crashed and tried to flee the scene before his arrest.

O’Rourke, then 26, was driving at “a high rate of speed” on a Texas highway roughly ten miles from the New Mexico border when he crashed into a truck and spun across the median into oncoming traffic. A witness whom O’Rourke passed shortly before crashing later told police he personally prevented O’Rourke from fleeing the scene. The unnamed witness “turned on his overhead lights to warn oncoming traffic and to try to get the defendant [O’Rourke] to stop,” according to the report.

The rising progressive star, who blew a 0.136 and a 0.134 on police breathalyzers, did not address the witness report that he tried to flee the scene in a statement released on Thursday.

“I drove drunk and was arrested for a DWI in 1998,” O’Rourke said. “As I’ve publicly discussed over the last 20 years, I made a serious mistake for which there is no excuse.”

Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is engaged in a tight race with O’Rourke, has not commented on the newly revealed details of his opponent’s arrest.

O’Rourke, the son of an El Paso County judge, was charged with driving while intoxicated following the incident but completed a court-ordered diversion program to ensure that the charges would be dismissed.

The DWI arrest was not O’Rourke’s only youthful run-in with law enforcement: He was also arrested for trespassing after hopping a fence at a University of Texas at El Paso facility.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Great Britain’s Great Farce By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on August 31st, 2018

Americans sometimes ask me whether British politics is really as shambolic as it looks. Beyond the 2017 general election, the indecisiveness over what to do post-Brexit vote, and the subsequent slew of Tory resignations, there are some other pressing queries.

Like, why hasn’t Jeremy Corbyn resigned already? Only last week, Labour MP Frank Field decided to leave his party of 40 years because he said its leadership is now “a force for anti-Semitism in British politics.” He’s right. To name but two examples: Corbyn has likened Israel to the Nazis and was caught on video making derogatory comments about Zionists at a Palestinian event in 2013.

Or, what is all this talk of a “People’s Vote”? That’s the increasing push, from what one political journalist rightly calls “a cabal of politicians, celebrities and millionaires,” for another vote on Brexit. Apparently, the 17.4 million people who voted to leave surely must have realized by now that they were wrong.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

What Did They Know? When Did They Know? How Did They Interpret the Information? By Alex Grobman, PhD Part 2

Posted By on August 31st, 2018

https://www.jewishlinknj.com/features/25956-what-did-they-know-when-did-they-know-how-did-they-interpret-the-information-2

Part II

Initial Reaction of American Jews to the Beginning of the War in Europe

American Jewish leaders were not surprised that the war would produce immense suffering for their European brethren. The initial reports deeply concerned them about the precarious position of the Jews in Eastern and Central Europe. Even before the war began, Hayim Greenberg, head of Poalei Zion and editor of the Labor Zionist Jewish Frontier, warned on June 15, 1939, that Jews “will be the first to suffer,” and that the conflict “might envelope the entire world.”

On September 13, 1939, Jacob Lestchinsky, the noted historian, sociologist and authority on Jewish demography and economic history, advised American Jews “to be prepared for events whose frightfulness will eclipse” the pogroms and massacres of the last war. “Human imagination,” he said, “is simply too limited to grasp the probable magnitude of the war’s toll or how much Jewish blood will be shed.” He feared the Jews of Ukraine, Galicia and Romania were in grave danger.

Writing in B’nai B’rith’s The National Call in October, 1939, Albert Viton, a journalist who reported from Palestine before joining the US Department of Agriculture in early 1940, observed that “everywhere Jews are the chief sufferers…and that there is no limit to their possible misery….” He believed that “a terribly large portion of Jews in Central, Eastern and Northern Europe will not survive the war; possibly as many as half of them will perish before the end.”

In the September-October 1939 issue of the Contemporary Jewish Record, published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Committee expressed uncertainty as to what awaited the Jews in the future. “It is as yet too early today to comprehend the full extent of the tragedy which has overtaken the world… but [it] is sufficiently great to defy the imagination and stir the deep sympathy of those who still believe in mercy, justice and the protection of the weak.”

The November 1939 edition of The Call, the official organ of the English-speaking division of the Workman’s Circle, acknowledged that European Jewry would be greatly affected. “In the coming days, the areas of Jewish wretchedness will increase, the intensity of Jewish agony will reach a breaking point.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

What Did They Know? When Did They Know? How Did They Interpret the Information? By Alex Grobman, PhD

Posted By on August 31st, 2018

https://www.jewishlinknj.com/features/25865-what-did-they-know-when-did-they-know-how-did-they-interpret-the-information

Part I

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum recently announced it is opening a new special exhibition, “Americans and the Holocaust,” in the spring of 2018 as a part of a museum-wide initiative exploring American responses to the Holocaust.

Among the questions the exhibit will attempt to answer are: What did American Jews know about the Holocaust, when did they know about the destruction and how did they respond?

If we are to learn from our past, we need to understand what American Jews knew about the plight of the Jews in Europe. When did the first reports appear in the Anglo-Jewish, American, Yiddish, and press about attacks against Jews? Did the accounts appear sporadically or often? How were they interpreted by American Jews? At any point did American Jews realize that the Nazi onslaught might be different than past massacres and persecution?

We begin our inquiry on September 1, 1939, when the war in Europe began. A wide range of national, regional and organizational papers and periodicals were reviewed. Another major source of information is derived from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin (JTA), a bureau established in 1914 to gather and distribute news about Jews. The New York Times is included in the survey since it is the newspaper of record in the U.S. The Times generally relegated the news concerning Jews to the inside or back pages of the paper. But this did not mean Jews did not see these articles. When reading a newspaper, Jews generally tend to look for items about the Jewish community no matter where they are positioned in the paper.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Bereshit/Genesis as metaphor: A moral cosmology by Moshe Dann

Posted By on August 31st, 2018

The Torah begins with descriptions of a world without form, the evolution of distinctions and differentiation – light/darkness, day/night, sea/dry land, and the origins of life – and with rules: what is permitted and what is forbidden.

The purpose of this narrative is not to teach us how, but why. It is meant not as a precise record of the world’s creation and the way it works, but as a guiding metaphor: Life has meaning because it has order, structure and rules that define purpose and link us to transcendence.

From a Torah perspective, the origins of the universe and life are not scientific questions, but moral obligations. It’s irrelevant whether the world is 5,776 years old or 50 million years old. What matters is how one lives – and the structure that the Torah provides is what shows us how to do so in a way that connects us to God.

This approach is apparent in God’s commandment to Noah to build an ark – not only what to build, but how to build it, the type of wood, dimensions, etc. Yet the size of the ark is not important; it is significant only as a God-inspired vessel – a metaphor for our own bodies and our lives. Noah was building a ship not only to save himself and his family, but to create a new civilization, one that would eventually produce Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, followed by the Jewish people, and influence mankind.

This idea of a God-ordered universe is intended to counter pagan ideas that nature and natural forces occur randomly. In the biblical pagan societies, there were no moral or ethical boundaries. In contrast, Judaism is based on the belief that everything and everyone has a divine purpose in the world. Regardless of difficulties and tragedies, one is obligated to fulfill that purpose.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Countdown to Civil War by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on August 31st, 2018

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21553/countdown-to-civil-war
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com
http://lindagoudsmit.com

On January 26, 2018 Daniel Greenfield gave a brilliant speech in South Carolina in which he argued that politics make civil wars – not guns. “Guns are how a civil war ends. Politics is how it begins.” What does that mean?

“Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge. That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.”

This is no small thing. The United States of America has distinguished itself by the peaceful transfer of power through elections for 242 years. Opposing parties compete in an election – one side wins and the other loses. The country reunites after the election in support of the office of the President and competes again four years later.

In 2016 Hillary Clinton competed against Donald Trump for the presidency and lost. For the first time in American history, 22 months after a presidential election the losing party still refuses to accept the election outcome. We are in a countdown to civil war. What changed?

The losing party of leftist Democrats began believing their own narrative of political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism. They live in the world of subjective reality where facts do not get in their way. Let me explain.

Subjective reality is a dreamscape where saying is the same as doing, all ideas are equal, and trying is the same as achieving. In the surreal world of subjective reality FEELINGS are the determining value. So, if you feel like Hillary should have won then in your mind she did win. If you feel that Donald Trump should not have won then he didn’t win – he is not your president.

In the objective world of FACTS Donald Trump won the election and is now the 45th president of the United States. He is President Donald Trump and is America’s president whether you like him or don’t like him, whether you agree with him or don’t agree with him, and whether you voted for him or didn’t vote for him. That is what it means to accept an election outcome – you accept the fact of it no matter how you feel about it.

As Tiger Woods so concisely pointed out, “He’s the president of the United States and you have to respect the office,” Tiger said. “No matter who’s in the office, you may like, dislike the personality or the politics, but we all must respect the office.”