ISRAEL Comments turned off

Thousands of Gaza Hamas Thugs Attack Israel for $100 a Day They attack for $100 a day. And Israeli soldiers fight them for $13 a day. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 15th, 2018

“The dedication of the embassy is a leap of faith. Faith in building rather than destruction. Faith in life instead of death.”

Hamas supporters in Gaza held the world’s first peaceful protest with hand grenades, pipe bombs, cleavers and guns. Ten explosive devices were peacefully detonated. There were outbursts of peaceful gunfire and over a dozen kites carrying firebombs were sent into Israel where they started 23 peaceful fires. And Israeli soldiers peacefully defended their country leaving multiple Hamas attackers at peace.

“We will tear down the border,” Hamas Prime Minister Yahya Sinwar had peacefully vowed. “And we will tear out their hearts from their bodies.”

But the only hearts his terror thugs tore out were already bleeding with sympathy for Islamic terrorists.

The Hamas mob chanted, “Allahu Akbar” and the genocidal racist threat of, “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud,” a reference to the primal Islamic massacre of the Jews. While IDF soldiers held back the invaders, the jets of the IAF targeted the snake’s head striking Hamas compounds and outposts. By 5.30 PM, the Hamas organizers changed course and began urging the thugs away from further fence attacks.

Hamas had offered $100 to every rioter. During previous violent assaults back in April, the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group had been offering $200 to anyone shot by Israelis, $500 for severe injuries and $3,000 to the dead.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Progressive Prison Reform in California: Crime Pays By Pedro Gonzalez

Posted By on May 15th, 2018

A few days ago, I received a text message from “Stacey,” of the Real Justice PAC, notifying me of San Diego County’s upcoming June 5 elections. We “will have a chance to replace our Republican District attorney with a progressive Democrat,” she informed me.

Naturally, I wanted to learn more about the latest progressive crusade.

Real Justice claims to be an outgrowth of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. The group’s objective is to elect prosecutors who will “fight for social justice.” To this end, “big organizing” is required to mobilize “massive audiences” for a “big agenda.” Using the power of “social media, digital tools and the voices of a new generation of leaders like Shaun King who are organizing massive audiences to take action locally and nationally through rapid response campaigns.” The last thing anyone wants is a call from Shaun King’s people. That’s the guy with a conspicuous lack of melanin who co-founded Black Lives Matter.

All this talk of a “systematic, mass participation approach” and the aggressive unsolicited phone calls and text messages reminded me of another organization—the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN).

ACORN’s mass participation program for electing social justice-minded bureaucrats entailed “enlisting millions of new and politicized voters.” ACORN called for mass democracy to “create an electoral environment hospitable to fundamental change in American society,” which required an “enlarged and politicized electorate” to “sustain and encourage the movements in American society that are already working for the rights of women and minorities.” And don’t forget “protection of the social programs, and . . . transformation of foreign policy.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Watch Clinton, Bush, And Obama Promise To Recognize Jerusalem As Israel’s Capital (And Then Do Nothing) The United States opened an embassy to Jerusalem today at the order of President Trump, who finally fulfilled a promise former presidents made for decades. By Bre Payton

Posted By on May 15th, 2018

The United States opened an embassy to Jerusalem today at the order of President Trump, who finally fulfilled a promise former presidents made for decades.

“We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem,” Trump said. “Therefore, I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. While previous presidents have made this a major campaign promise they failed to deliver. Today I am delivering.”

President Bill Clinton said in 1992 that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, despite the U.S. embassy being in Tel Aviv. “Jerusalem is still the capital of Israel and must remain an undivided city accessible to all,” he said.

George W. Bush promised 18 years ago, “As soon as I take office I will begin the process of moving the U.S. ambassador to the city Israel has chosen as its capital.”

“I continue to say that Jerusalem will be the capital of Israel, and I have said that before, and I will say it again,” President Barack Obama said at an AIPAC conference. “And Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Journalists Should Stop Falling For Hamas’ Deadly PR Efforts Against Israel The terrorist organization uses its own people as cannon fodder so it can play victim. David Harsanyi

Posted By on May 15th, 2018

Hamas isn’t merely a terrorist organization committed to murdering Jews, it’s a terrorist organization that urges its own people to become cannon fodder as a means of appealing to Western journalists and intellectuals. The higher the death toll, the happier Hamas will be. And few things have more of a detrimental effect on the Palestinian cause than the media’s asymmetrical coverage of this conflict with the Jews.

Until Palestinians shed their hatred, turn from the Israeli fences, and march towards their own governments, they will remain pawns and saps in a decades-long suicide mission. That’s because no amount of bad press about Israel’s efforts to stop violence coming from Gaza will impel that nation to create a terror state on its borders. It’s untenable, not to mention immoral. We would never contemplate such a thing. Nor would any rational country.

Despite what you’ve heard, the 35,000 Palestinian “demonstrators” massed along the security fence between Israel and Gaza — the ones throwing firebombs and other explosives, burning tires, chucking rocks (if you think these are aren’t deadly, you should see one landing; I have), and those attempting to light fires to burn crops and vegetation — are only ostensibly protesting the United States moving its embassy to Israel’s capital. I know this because Hamas doesn’t accept a U.S. embassy anywhere in Israel, as it doesn’t recognize Israel at all.

Hamas has openly asserted that it’s attempting to create incursions into Israel, and that has absolutely nothing to do with East or West or North or South Jerusalem. For Palestinians this is about the 70th anniversary of Israel — or, as they see it, Nakba. It’s about an ongoing historic effort — an intermittently theocratic or nationalistic effort, depending on the trends — to play victim.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Hard Left at UT Having fought hard for racial preferences in admissions, the University of Texas now seeks to expand faculty diversity. Mark Pulliam

Posted By on May 15th, 2018

Political correctness and identity politics are corrupting colleges and universities around the country, public and private, even in states usually regarded as Republican bastions. It may surprise some readers, but in the home state of stalwart conservative Senator Ted Cruz, where the GOP controls both houses of the legislature and holds all statewide elected offices, leftist zealots at the University of Texas are in control and doing their best to mimic—or perhaps outdo—UC Berkeley.

Under the leadership of university president Greg Fenves, UT is being molded into a burnt-orange knock-off of Evergreen State—a showcase for left-wing academic fads. Fenves, a Berkeley alumnus who also taught there, has overseen the removal of “offensive” historical statuary (including one commemorating a former Texas governor, James Stephen Hogg); an expensive legal battle to defend the school’s use of racial preferences in admissions; the expansion of a highly paid diversity bureaucracy (with a staff approaching 100); the denial of due process in UT’s handling of sexual-misconduct claims; the implementation of campus speech codes and the creation of “bias response teams”; and, in 2016, UT’s first international black studies conference, featuring the notorious Communist activist Angela Davis (a former member of the FBI’s most wanted list) as a keynote speaker.

Many UT alumni place greater importance on the success of the school’s sports teams than they do on academic politics, paying scant attention to Fenves’s transformation of their alma mater into a social-justice academy. Despite his aggressive activist agenda, the only significant pushback Fenves has faced thus far was over the university’s “MasculinUT” program, a widely ridiculed campaign designed to combat “toxic masculinity” on campus. The risible initiative suggested that men suffer when they are told to “act like a man” or are encouraged to be the “breadwinner.” The $330,000-per-year Dean of Students, Soncia Reagins-Lilly, was forced to put the program on hold when national media and radio talk show hosts mocked it.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iranian Student Group Offers $100K Reward to Blow Up U.S. Jerusalem Embassy By Rick Moran

Posted By on May 15th, 2018

An Iranian student group known as the Iranian Justice Seeker Student Movement has been putting up posters offering a $100,000 bounty to anyone who will blow up the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.

The Washington Free Beacon:

“The Student Justice Movement will support anybody who destroy the illegal American embassy in Jerusalem,” the poster states in Farsi, Arabic, and English, according to an independent translation of the propaganda poster provided to the Free Beacon.

There will be a “$100,000 dollar prize for the person who destroys the illegal American embassy in Jerusalem,” the poster states.

The call for an attack on the new embassy is just the latest escalation by hostile Islamic states and leaders who have lashed out at the United States and President Donald Trump for making good on a campaign promise to relocate the embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s declared capital city of Jerusalem.

News of the bomb threat was first reported by the University Student News Network, a regional Farsi-language site that aggregates relevant news briefs.

“The Student Movement for Justice declared, ‘Whoever bombs the embassy’s building will receive a $100,000 award,'” the report states. “It is necessary to mention that the steps by Trump to transfer the US Embassy to Holy Qods [Jerusalem] has led to the anger and hatred of Muslims and liberators throughout the world.'”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

It’s Now 1984 at the University of Michigan By Hans A. von Spakovsky

Posted By on May 15th, 2018

Students at the University of Michigan, beware. If you say anything politically incorrect or out-of-line with the political and social orthodoxy on your campus, you may get a knock on your dorm room door from the university’s equivalent of the Thought Police, and be forced into a re-education camp. Or you may be suspended or thrown out of school, potentially damaging your educational prospects and your entire future professional career.

If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider a new lawsuit filed in federal court in Michigan by Speech First, Inc., against the president of the University of Michigan, other senior university officials, and the entire board of trustees. Speech First is a nationwide membership organization of students, faculty, and alumni (including students at Michigan) dedicated to preserving First Amendment rights on college campuses.

That is a very tough job these days when so many students and administrators don’t believe the First Amendment should apply in their dormitories, their classrooms, or anywhere else on campus (or off campus, for that matter).

Don’t be surprised if what I am about to describe sounds like a scene out of George Orwell’s 1984, where the Thought Police would arrest any citizen criticizing the regime or otherwise disagreeing with the official view on everything from politics to culture. And they used surveillance that included informers and electronic devices like cameras and microphones.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey Slams Proposed French Changes to Quran by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on May 15th, 2018

“We must revolutionize our religion,” — Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, December, 2014.

“A Muslim is to hate what Allah hates and love what Allah loves. Allah hates the Kafir, therefore, a Muslim is to act accordingly.” — Dr. Bill Warner, “Sharia Law for Non-Muslims,” a publication of the Center for the Study of Political Islam.

“The point is not that these things are written in Islamic scripture, but that people still live by them.” — Bruce Bawer, author.

On April 21, the French daily Le Parisien published a “Manifesto against the new anti-Semitism,” written by Philippe Val, a co-founder and former director of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the target of the 2015 terrorist attack that left 12 employees dead.

The declaration — signed by more than 250 prominent French intellectuals, artists and politicians, among them former President Nicolas Sarkozy – calls on Islamic theologians to remove the verses of the Quran that call for the killing and punishment of Jews, Christians and Muslim non-believers.

The manifesto reads, in part:

“Anti-Semitism is not the business of the Jews. It’s the business of all of us. The French, who have demonstrated their democratic maturity after each Islamist attack, are living through a tragic paradox. Their country has become the arena for murderous anti-Semitism.

“We demand that the fight against this democratic failure that is anti-Semitism becomes a national cause before it’s too late. Before France is no longer France.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Human Rights: Other Views – Part II by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on May 15th, 2018

Palestinian human rights organizations such as Al-Mezan, along with their many supporters abroad and even within a substantial part of the Jewish diaspora, have turned the very concept of human rights on its head.

Although genuine and widely praised for their advocacy of human rights internationally, even Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation for Human Rights and the humanitarian relief body Oxfam International have reputations of extreme bias against Israel.

What are any of these people doing actually to help the Palestinians — such as creating jobs, assuring good governance, establishing schools, hospitals, health care and dental clinics, safeguarding legal standards, stopping the arrests of journalists or others who dare to criticize the current governments and so on? Rather, the issues they address seem more a rationalization to destroy Israel.

We have seen in Part One of this article how far Western standards of human rights differ from those guaranteed by Islam. One obvious outcome of this disparity is, of course, that citizens of Muslim countries are accorded fewer rights than their counterparts in liberal democracies. Thus, women, girls, gays, members of religious minorities, “blasphemers”, bloggers (notably in Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia) reformers and others may be subjected to partial or total deprival of what the rest of the world considers to be unquestionable or God-given rights. Women may be forced to dress in all-encompassing clothing or hijabs. Minorities may be imprisoned or killed. Women even alleged to have committed adultery – but often just the victims of rape – may be flogged or else stoned to death. LGBT individuals may imprisoned or killed, while bloggers, reformist intellectuals, moderate Qur’an interpreters face flogging and murder by mobs.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Target of NBC smear, Gatestone Institute responds brilliantly By Rick Moran

Posted By on May 15th, 2018

In a classic smear, NBC News “investigated” the Gatestone Institute and found that it is an “anti-Muslim think-tank” with ties to the same Russians who interfered in the 2016 election.

NBC’s report begins with an iteration of the Russia-Trump collusion story: that Gatestone’s former chairman, Ambassador John Bolton, now U.S. National Security Advisor, who has described Russia’s attempts to undermine the U.S. election as an act of war, was affiliated with “a nonprofit that has promoted misleading and false anti-Muslim news, some of which was amplified by a Russian troll factory,” implying that he was somehow colluding with Russia to spread anti-Muslim propaganda. NBC initially provides no evidence for this claim, but buried deep inside the article it asserts that, according to its “exclusive database,” Russian trolls tweeted a total of four Gatestone articles – out of more than 200,000 tweets identified by Twitter as being linked to Russian accounts. Bolton, on the contrary, is usually criticized for having hawkish views on Russia. …

NBC News also provides no evidence for its insinuation that White House attorneys are “potential[ly]” investigating Bolton’s affiliation with Gatestone. Moreover, after first implying that Bolton is “anti-Muslim,” NBC undercuts its own claims by admitting that his name cannot be found on “the anti-Muslim articles at issue.” NBC also acknowledges that Bolton was opposed to Trump’s so-called Muslim ban.

The NBC report, written by political reporter Heidi Przybyla, appears to be based almost entirely on a series of deceptive reports about Gatestone by The Intercept, a left-leaning digital news site which itself has admitted to fabricating stories and quotes and is listed as one of “The Best Websites to Follow If You’re Plotting the Left-Wing Resistance”. The NBC report, which fails to cite The Intercept, is also intriguingly similar to false allegations in Wikipedia, which also parrots numerous false, but published, claims about Gatestone, such as that Gatestone incorrectly writes about the existence of no-go zones.