WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Belgium: First Islamic State in Europe? by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on April 22nd, 2018

The leaders of Belgium’s ISLAM Party apparently want to turn Belgium into an Islamic State. They call it “Islamist democracy” and have set a target date: 2030.

“The program is confusingly simple: replace all the civil and penal codes with sharia law. Period”. — French magazine Causeur.

“The European capital [Brussels] will be Muslim in twenty years”. — Le Figaro.

The French acronym of Belgium’s ISLAM Party stands for “Integrity, Solidarity, Liberty, Authenticity, Morality”. The leaders of the ISLAM Party apparently want to turn Belgium into an Islamic State. They call it “Islamist democracy” and have set a target date: 2030.

According to the French magazine Causeur, “the program is confusingly simple: replace all the civil and penal codes with sharia law. Period”. Created on the eve of the 2012 municipal ballot, the ISLAM Party immediately received impressive results. Its numbers are alarming.

The effect of this new party, according to Michaël Privot, an expert on Islam, and Sebastien Boussois, a political scientist, could be the “implosion of the social body”. Some Belgian politicians, such as Richard Miller, are now advocating banning the ISLAM Party.

The French weekly magazine Le Point details the plans of the ISLAM Party: It would like to “prevent vice by banning gaming establishments (casinos, gaming halls and betting agencies) and the lottery”. Along with authorizing the wearing the Muslim headscarf at school and an agreement about the Islamic religious holidays, the party wants all schools in Belgium to offer halal meat on their school menus. Redouane Ahrouch, one of the party’s three founders, also proposed segregating men and women on public transport. Ahrouch belonged in the 1990s to the Belgian Islamic Center, a nest of Islamic fundamentalism where candidates for jihad in Afghanistan and Iraq were recruited.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Tim Blair Creative Climate Accounting

Posted By on April 22nd, 2018

The UN’s emphasis on per capita emissions tells us next to nothing about planetary survivability but a great deal about the world body’s dishonesty. We’d be well rid of a corrosive organisation that is home to more criminals than Chicago in the 1920s. In per capita terms, of course.

What does two plus two equal? Ask almost anyone and they will quickly answer: four. Or perhaps not so quickly, if you’ve asked a recent arts graduate. But even they will get there, eventually, if born with an adequate finger supply.

Let’s suppose, however, that their answer is the same as four but is expressed in a pointlessly complicated way. “36,527 minus 36,523,” they might reply. Or “the composite number found between the two first-occurring prime numbers”. Or “the square root of sixteen”.

For good reason, you might wonder at the motivation behind this mathematical posturing. Maybe your respondent is seeking to embarrass or confuse you, in which case a beating should be arranged. “How many broken ribs do you have?” you may later ask of that composite-number fellow, as a mathematically-themed part of your payment calculations.

Then again, it could be that concealment is the aim.

Certain people—lawyers, for example, and anyone involved in drafting taxation legislation—delight in disguising simplicity beneath needless complexity. I was once directed to a “ground-based facility” at a concert venue; turns out this was a tent. And every journalist has endured police media conferences featuring lines like: “The vehicle was travelling in a northerly direction when it left the road surface …”

Those last two cases are relatively innocent and easily decoded. Not so the language used by our carbon-panic community, who resort to an extraordinary variety of tricks in order to sell their message of doom. They do this because they cannot otherwise escape one awkward and devastatingly simple fact.

Australia produces just 1.3 per cent of the planet’s alleged global warming gases.

This means that even if Australia were to be removed from the earth in its entirety—every factory, every road, every vehicle, every supermarket, every airport, every head of livestock, every coal mine, every speck of soil and every Australian—it would make no significant difference at all to the planet’s carbon-emissions wellbeing. “If reducing emissions really is necessary to save the planet, our effort, however Herculean, is barely better than futile,” Tony Abbott pointed out last year in his excellent London speech, “because Australia’s total annual emissions are exceeded by just the annual increase in China’s.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

‘Poontronage’: When Kamala Met Willie By Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on April 22nd, 2018

She is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough,” said the president of the United States in 2013. “She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.”

That would be former California Attorney General Kamala Harris, daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, and now the state’s junior U.S. senator. As it happens, Barack Obama was not the first prominent Democrat to be dazzled by the UC Berkeley beauty.

As speaker of the California State Assembly from 1980 to 1995, Willie Brown was by far the Golden State’s most powerful shot-caller. In 1994 Brown, 60, met Kamala Harris, a full 30 years his junior, and she became “the Speaker’s new steady,” Brown’s “girlfriend” and “frequent companion.” The two-year relationship worked out well for Harris.

Willie Brown appointed Harris to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which paid $97,088 a year. She served six months and Brown then appointed her to the California Medical Assistance Commission, which met only once a month but paid Harris $72,000. Call it “poontronage,” a politician’s appointment of his steady girlfriend, frequent companion, and main squeeze to a lucrative government position requiring little work.

Brown also raised money for Harris in her run for San Francisco district attorney in 2003. She defeated her former boss Terence Hallinan but promised never to seek the death penalty. She kept that promise the next year when gang member David Hill used an AK-47 to gun down San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza. Even Dianne Feinstein took Harris to task, as she alienated police across the state.

In her 2009 Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make us Safer, written with ghostwriter Joan O’C. Hamilton, Harris found the number of nonviolent offenders “truly staggering” and put them at the top of her “crime pyramid.” The next year, Harris ran for state attorney general and the Sacramento Bee endorsed her Republican rival Steve Cooley. Harris won by less than one percentage point, but as the Bee saw it, “she could be more aggressive on public corruption cases, though her handlers might worry that would cause friction with fellow Democratic politicians.”

The new span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge—10 years late, $5 billion over budget and riddled with safety issues—had whistleblowers calling for a criminal investigation. Duly apprised of the fathomless corruption, Harris failed to launch any criminal probe. With voter fraud and violent crime she simply looked the other way.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Meowing Media Fuel Mass Delusion of Russian Collusion By Steven J. Allen

Posted By on April 22nd, 2018

Every mass delusion has a beginning.

One day in the Middle Ages, a French nun began meowing. Other nuns soon joined in. Soon, all the nuns in the convent were meowing together several hours a day. They stopped after neighbors complained, and some soldiers threatened to beat up the nuns.

Like the chorus of meowing nuns, the Russia Truther movement began at a particular time and place: a press conference that Donald Trump conducted on July 27, 2016, in Doral, Florida.

Some background:

In March 2015, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that, while in office, she diverted some 66,000 emails to a server in the basement of her house. As the Associated Press would determine, the server was “vulnerable to hackers” and the setup was “the subject of U.S. government and industry warnings at the time over attacks from even low-skilled intruders.”

After the diversion was discovered, Clinton returned roughly half of the stolen emails. The other half, she claimed, related to private matters and were deleted. Some, it turned out, were destroyed while under subpoena.

Despite the deletions, there was a chance that the stolen emails might be found because Russia and other adversaries probably had their own copies.

In 2015, Mike Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (who would be a Trump adviser), said the odds were “very high—likely,” that Russia and other countries had broken into the system. Mike Morrell, former acting director and deputy director of the CIA, said, “I think that foreign intelligence services, the good ones, have everything on any unclassified network that the government uses.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Liberalism as Faith By Andrew Stuttaford

Posted By on April 22nd, 2018

The British philosopher John Gray is not someone to shy away from ‘difficult’ topics. If you are looking for a provocative long read this weekend, his new article in the Times Literary Supplement ought to be a contender. I didn’t agree with all of it (for example, I would argue that the supposedly secular totalitarianisms of the twentieth century—essentially millenarian sects, as Gray rightly observes—were even more ‘religious’ than even he would claim), not that that matters.

Above all, Gray’s take on where the arguments of John Stuart Mill, one of the saints of traditional liberalism, have led is, to say the least, intriguing.

An extract:

[Mill’s] assertion that human beings would prefer intellectual freedom over contented conformity was at odds with his empiricist philosophy. Essentially unfalsifiable, it was a matter of faith.

While he never faced up to the contradictions in his thinking, Mill was fully aware that he was fashioning a new religion. Much influenced by Auguste Comte, he was an exponent of what he and the French Positivist philosopher described as “the Religion of Humanity”. Instead of worshipping a transcendent divinity, Comte instructed followers of the new religion to venerate the human species as “the new Supreme Being”. Replacing the rituals of Christianity, they would perform daily ceremonies based in science, touching their skulls at the point that phrenology had identified as the location of altruism (a word Comte invented). In an essay written not long before the appearance of On Liberty but published posthumously (he died in 1873), Mill described this creed as “a better religion than any of those that are ordinarily called by that title”.

That may or may not be true, but at least Mill recognized its essentially religious nature, not that that took much doing.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Kamala Harris: The Most Dangerous Democrat in America By Michael Walsh

Posted By on April 22nd, 2018

Imagine a combination of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and you’ve got Kamala Harris, the current seat-warming senator from California who, like Obama, is using the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body as a resume-puncher before swiftly moving on to bigger things: the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination. Even as a nobody senator, she’s been the subject of dozens, perhaps scores of speculative stories about her future, so now — lest they build her up too quickly — Politico and other Democrat cheerleaders are cautioning her to get her ducks in order before heading out on the hustings:

Kamala Harris has been called “the female Barack Obama.” She’s built a national following with her outspoken criticism of Donald Trump and prolific fundraising for fellow Democrats. But the California senator’s rapid rise — she’s just 15 months into her first term — has created an awkward issue: Even as progressives tout her as one of the top 2020 contenders, Harris remains something of a mystery back home.

Her approval ratings are solid, but not stratospheric. And 28 percent of California voters say they don’t know or have no opinion about Harris, according to a recent Morning Consult poll — placing her in the bottom 10 of name recognition among U.S. senators in their home states. A Berkeley IGS Poll in September found California voters — by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 49 percent to 22 percent — would rather Harris stay in the Senate than run for president in 2020.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

AMAZING ISRAEL AT 70-FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on April 22nd, 2018

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Long-lasting MS treatment. Israeli biotech Mapi has developed a formulation of Glatiramer Acetate that Multiple Sclerosis patients only need take once a month, rather than daily. Glatiramer Acetate Depot is still in Phase 3 trials but Mapi has already sold the marketing rights to multinational giant Mylan.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/mylan-buys-rights-to-israel-developed-ms-treatment/

More generic alternatives. (TY Atid EDI) Israel’s Teva has launched generic versions of the anti-nausea treatment ALOXI and Lialda delayed-release mesalamine. It is good news for cancer patients receiving chemotherapy and ulcerative colitis sufferers respectively.
https://www.tevagenerics.com/product/palonosetron-hydrochloride-injection
https://www.tevagenerics.com/product/mesalamine-delayed-release-tablets-usp

Glucose monitor approved for iPhones. (TY Atid-EDI) I reported previously (Jan 2016) that the Israeli Dario blood sugar monitor had received FDA approval. Now approval has been extended for the device to be used on the latest Apple iPhones including iPhone 7, 8 and X. http://mydario.investorroom.com/2018-03-26-DarioHealth-Receives-U-S-FDA-Clearance-for-iPhone-7-8-and-iPhone-X-Smart-Glucose-Meter

Smartphone-based urine tests at home. Israeli startup Healthy.io has partnered with the American National Kidney Foundation and Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health System to offer its home testing kits to U.S. patients. Healthy.io transforms a regular smartphone into a device that performs lab-standard urine analysis.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3736139,00.html https://healthy.io/
https://vimeo.com/195720514 BBC doesn’t mention Israel. CNBC does! https://vimeo.com/154610009

Diagnosing resistant hypertension. (TY Atid-EDI) I reported previously (Aug 2011) that Hadassah surgeons had devised and used an innovative tool to treat resistant hypertension due to overactive kidney nerves. Now Israel’s Pythagoras Medical has received the CE mark for its ConfidenHT System to help identify such patients.
http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/pythagoras-medical-receives-ce-mark-for-the-confidenht-system-677894643.html http://www.rainbowmd.com/our-companies/

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Jewish Power at 70 Years Bret Stephens

Posted By on April 22nd, 2018

Adam Armoush is a 21-year-old Israeli Arab who, on a recent outing in Berlin, donned a yarmulke to test a friend’s contention that it was unsafe to do so in Germany. On Tuesday he was assaulted in broad daylight by a Syrian asylum-seeker who whipped him with a belt for being “yahudi” — Arabic for Jew.

The episode was caught on video and has caused a national uproar. Heiko Maas, the foreign minister, tweeted, “Jews shall never again feel threatened here.”

It’s a vow not likely to be fulfilled. There were nearly 1,000 reported anti-Semitic incidents in Berlin alone last year. A neo-fascist party, Alternative for Germany, has 94 seats in the Bundestag. Last Thursday, a pair of German rappers won a prestigious music award, given largely on the basis of sales, for an album in which they boast of having bodies “more defined than Auschwitz prisoners.” The award ceremony coincided with Holocaust Remembrance Day.

To be Jewish — at least visibly Jewish — in Europe is to live on borrowed time. That’s not to doubt the sincerity and good will of Maas or other European leaders who recommit to combating anti-Semitism every time a European Jew is murdered or a Jewish institution attacked. It’s only to doubt their capacity.

There’s a limit to how many armed guards can be deployed indefinitely to protect synagogues or stop Holocaust memorials from being vandalized. There’s a limit, also, to trying to cure bigotry with earnest appeals to tolerance. The German government is mulling a proposal to require recent arrivals in the country to tour Nazi concentration camps as a way of engendering a feeling of empathy for Jews. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that, to the virulent anti-Semite, Buchenwald is a source of inspiration, not shame.

All this comes to mind as Israel this week marks (in the Hebrew calendar) the 70th anniversary of its independence. There are many reasons to celebrate the date, many of them lofty: a renaissance for Jewish civilization; the creation of a feisty liberal democracy in a despotic neighborhood; the ecological rescue of a once-barren land; the end of 1,878 years of exile.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Survives Because of an Iron Will and an Iron Wall Palestinian protests on Independence day are hopeless, thanks in large part of an essay written in 1923. by Zev Chafets

Posted By on April 22nd, 2018

In the run-up to this week’s 70th anniversary of Israel’s independence, Israeli Defense Forces chief of Staff General Gabi Eisenkot pronounced the country “invincible.”

This was a bold statement. The country faces a growing threat from Iran and its puppets in Lebanon and Gaza, and the possibility of a clash with Russia over Syria. And yet, few Israelis have disagreed with this assessment.

There is mood of confidence here, and its origin lies in a doctrine of strategic defense that has proven itself over nearly a century of intermittent warfare.

That doctrine was first enunciated in an article in 1923 entitled “The Iron Wall.” Its author was Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a visionary Zionist leader and the ideological father of the Likud.

At the time of its publication, the Jews of Palestine were a small, embattled minority. Only three years had passed since the first Arab riots in Jerusalem against them. The Jewish community’s socialist leaders hoped they could appease Arab enmity by offering economic cooperation, progress and prosperity.

Jabotinsky derided this as childish, and insulting to the Arabs, who would not barter away their homeland for more bread or modern railroads. They would, he said, resist while they had a spark of hope of preventing a Jewish state.

“There is only one thing the Zionists want, and that is the one thing the Arabs do not want,” he wrote. Nothing short of abandoning the Zionist project would placate Arab hostility and violence. If the Jews wanted to remain, they would have to come to terms with a harsh reality: This was a zero-sum game. There could be no peace until the Arabs accepted Israel’s right to exist.

Jabotinsky saw that the Arabs (in Palestine and beyond) were far too numerous to be defeated in a single decisive war. The Jews needed to erect an iron wall of self-defense and deterrence — a metaphorical wall built of Jewish determination, immigration, material progress, strong democratic institutions and a willingness to fight. Gradually, the enemy would be forced to conclude that this wall could not be breached.

The Iron Wall concept was intended to deter aggression until psychological victory was won, and extremists, “whose watchword is ‘Never!’” were replaced by more moderate leaders willing to live peacefully with a Jewish state.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Germany: by Soeren Kern

Posted By on April 21st, 2018

Anti-Semitism is running rampant at German primary schools, according to Heinz-Peter Meidinger, president of the President of the German Teachers’ Association (Deutschen Lehrerverbandes, DL). He also said that videos of beheadings are commonplace at German schools, and that female pupils are being threatened with murder. “In chat forums like WhatsApp, movies such as ISIS beheading videos are spreading like wildfire.”

“It is unacceptable that non-Muslim and above all Jewish children have to be afraid of going to school in this country because they are being labeled as ‘unbelievers’ and even threatened with death…. Since autumn… Kuwait Airways is allowed to discriminate against Jews at Frankfurt Airport, and the Federal Government does not object. Let us not fool ourselves: it is the Federal Government, which, for inexplicable reasons, allows Jews in Germany to be treated like this.” — Julian Reichelt, Editor-in-Chief of Bild.

“Mass gatherings that degenerate into violence are incompatible with our understanding of democracy. Humanity, tolerance, respect and dealing with each other in a democratic way are the basic values ​​on which our coexistence is oriented. We all want to live in a peaceful, open and democratic society.” — Sören Link, Mayor of Duisburg.

March 1. The Spreewald Elementary School in Berlin’s Schöneberg district hired security guards to protect teachers and students from unruly students. Around 99% of the pupils at the school have a migration background. “Within the past year, the violence has increased so much that we now had to take this measure,” said headmaster Doris Unzeit. “The violence is widespread and we want to take countermeasures with the security service. This should improve the reputation of the school and ensure that the children can learn here again in peace.”

March 2. A 41-year-old Syrian, Abu Marwan, stabbed to death his 37-year-old wife in Mühlacker. The couple’s three children, a girl and two boys, witnessed the murder. It later emerged that immediately after the killing, the blood-stained man posted a video on Facebook warning women not to irritate their husbands: “This is how you’ll end.”

March 4. A 30-year-old man who raped at least four women at or near subway stations in Berlin turned himself in after police published surveillance photos of him. The man chose his victims while riding on subway trains. He made eye contact with them, followed them out of the station and subsequently raped them. Berlin police blacked out information about the man’s nationality. Berliner Zeitung filled in the missing details: he is from Egypt.

March 4. A group of ten migrants sexually assaulted several women at an outdoor festival in Lienen. The attack was a case of taharush, a practice in which groups of Arab males encircle females and assault them.

March 5. Middle Eastern crime families in Berlin are intimidating police by provoking officers during arrests and filming them with cell phones, according to Welt am Sonntag. They are also spreading false rumors, accusing police of seeking sexual favors from prostitutes who are pimped by the very same crime families. “This is a very observable tactic to discredit the colleagues,” said the spokesman for the GdP police union in Berlin, Benjamin Jendro. “The criminals want to show that the state is losing control. This has become a popular sport.”