WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pakistan: Blasphemy Laws, Human-Rights Abuses Deepen by A. Z. Mohamed

Posted By on December 28th, 2017

The Pakistani parliament is becoming increasingly radicalized — as the results of a local by-election in Lahore in September demonstrated.

In such a political climate, and with a new prime minister who refuses to criticize his country’s blasphemy laws, let alone work to repeal them, Pakistan’s already fragile “democracy” is on a steady slide backwards.

In late September — less than three weeks after newly instated Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi attended the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly in New York — two Christian boys employed as cleaners at a hospital in Pakistan were arrested for violating the country’s blasphemy laws. According to the complaint lodged with police, the boys had swept up and burned strewn pieces of paper on which Quranic verses happened to be written.

At around the same time, a Pakistani court sentenced a Christian man to death for insulting the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in a poem he sent to a Muslim friend on the WhatsApp messaging service. This came two months after a young Muslim Pakistani was sentenced to death for “blasphemous” posts on Facebook.

On September 20, after the closing of the General Assembly, Abbasi was invited to give a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations. During the Q&A period — at the end of his “conversation” with David Sanger of the New York Times — he was asked by Human Rights Watch (HRW) director Kenneth Roth whether he would “speak out against [Pakistan’s] blasphemy law, and certainly about [its] harsh application…with death sentences and mob violence and the like.”

Abbasi replied by dodging the question:

“[I]t’s only up to the parliament to amend the laws. The job of the government is to make sure that the laws are not abused and innocent people are not prosecuted or prosecuted.”

At this point, Sanger interjected:

“[C]ertainly it is up to the parliament, but you’re in a position of both great political and moral leadership now in your post as prime minister. And I think the core of the question was whether or not the leaders of Pakistan are willing to go stand up to what seems to be, at least through American and Western eyes at time(s), deat

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ISIS Takes Hold in Pakistan by Kaswar Klasra

Posted By on December 28th, 2017

In February 2016, the director general of the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau warned the government that ISIS was emerging as a threat, with Pakistani terrorists providing a foothold for the group, whose Pakistani branch is called Walayat-e-Khurasan.

ISIS also enlists “partners of convenience” in Afghanistan and “outsources” terror attacks to Pakistani organizations — such as Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar — a recent UN Security Council counter-terrorism report revealed. In addition, as many as 100 Pakistanis left the country in 2015 to join ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

The most vulnerable victims of this threat are Christians, who make up a mere 2% of the Sunni Muslim-majority state. ISIS is only the latest terrorist group to have attacked Christians in Pakistan.

Concern over the extent of the presence and power of ISIS in Pakistan resurfaced on December 17, when a suicide-bombing at a church in Quetta left at least nine worshipers dead and more than 50 seriously wounded.

Had Pakistani security forces not responded swiftly to the attack on the Bethel Memorial Methodist Church — where 400 men, women and children were attending Sunday services – the assailants “would have managed to reach the main hall of the building, and the death toll would have been much higher,” Sarfraz Bugti, the provincial home minister of the Baluchistan province, where Quetta is located, told Gatestone Institute.

Responsibility for the attack — in which two terrorists, clad in explosive vests and armed with AK-47 rifles — was later claimed by ISIS, which has an impressive record of honesty in taking credit for attacks, in a statement published by the Amaq News Agency.

This was the sixth ISIS attack in Pakistan in the past year and a half. The first took place on August 8, 2016, when a suicide bomber killed at least 70 people and wounded more than 100 in an attack on a crowd of lawyers and journalists gathered in a government hospital in Quetta — in the province that borders Afghanistan and Iran — to mourn a lawyer who had been murdered earlier in the day. The attack was claimed by a joint ISIS-Taliban faction.

On October 24, 2016, ISIS claimed responsibility for a deadly attack on a police training college in Quetta. The assault, committed by three heavily armed terrorists against sleeping cadets, left more than 60 dead and more than 165 others wounded.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Scientific American is Officially a Joke Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 28th, 2017

I’ve written about the descent of the formerly prestigious Scientific American into social justice blogging before. But this jumps the shark. And all the starving polar bears on the ice floes. And Al Gore’s mansion and private jet.

Men Resist Green Behavior as Un-Manly

Please, tell us more.

Our own research suggests an additional possibility: men may shun eco-friendly behavior because of what it conveys about their masculinity.

Like caring more about brand virtue signaling than doing anything useful?

But surely this is based on solid research. After all, research was clearly mentioned.

In one study, we threatened the masculinity of male participants by showing them a pink gift card with a floral design and asking them to imagine using the card to purchase three products (lamp, backpack, and batteries). Compared to men shown a standard gift card, threatened men were more likely to choose the non-green rather than green version of each item. The idea that emasculated men try to reassert their masculinity through non-environmentally-friendly choices suggests that in addition to littering, wasting water, or using too much electricity, one could harm the environment merely by making men feel feminine.

This comes from two associate professors of marketing. Their solution is to put more wolves on eco-friendly products. That will be less threatening.

At the end of the article, there’s this notice. “Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about?”

If you’re a marketing scientist who specializes in putting wolf virtue signaling, please send your peer-reviewed paper to the Scientific American.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Politics of Caesar’s Wife Maintaining high Victorian standards of sexual behavior in a sexually saturated culture. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on December 28th, 2017

In 62 B.C., the tribune Clodius Pulcher was caught sneaking into Julius Caesar’s house during a religious ritual forbidden to men. Clodius was allegedly attempting to seduce Caesar’s wife, Pompeia, who was hosting the ceremony and was rumored to welcome Clodius’ advances. Because the scandal happened at Caesar’s house, he divorced her.

At Clodius’ trial for sacrilege, however, Caesar testified that he knew nothing of the matter, despite the evidence and despite widespread rumors about Pompeia and Clodius. When asked by the prosecutor why then he had divorced his wife, Caesar responded with the now proverbial, “I thought my wife ought not to be under suspicion.” But as Plutarch adds, Caesar’s decision was not about upholding standards of religious purity or virtuous behavior. Caesar had made a political calculation: the accused was a tribune of the people and a favorite of the masses, who were threatening the jurors with violence. As a leader of the populares, the people, Caesar couldn’t afford to alienate his volatile supporters by testifying against their champion.

The recent numerous accusations of sexual misconduct, harassment, or assault by politicians and celebrities, some of which date back forty years, have been accompanied by condemnations of the accused redolent of the “Caesar’s Wife” standard: political leaders “ought not to be under suspicion.” In Caesar’s time as in ours, this rigorous standard of behavior reflects politics as much as a commitment to virtue.

After eight women accused U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) of various forms of sexual harassment, more than 30 senators, including 21 women, five of them Republicans, called for him to step down. Most of the accusations comprised unwanted physical contact and clumsy passes; one, a photograph of Franken pretending to grope a sleeping journalist’s breasts, was clearly a juvenile gag. Franken in his resignation announcement did not apologize or admit his guilt. Instead, he claimed that some of the allegations were “simply untrue,” and others he remembered “differently.” He also decried “the false impression that I was admitting to doing things that, in fact, I haven’t done.” At this point, little corroborating evidence has surfaced that definitively proves Franken’s guilt.

As well as exposing a sexual offender, however, and asserting high standards of personal behavior, the reaction to the charges against Franken to many smacked of political expediency. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) was the first Democrat to call for Franken’s resignation, saying that “any kind of mistreatment of women in our society isn’t acceptable.” A few weeks earlier, after Gillibrand had criticized former President Bill Clinton for not resigning over the Monica Lewinsky scandal, many questioned why it took nearly 20 years for Gillibrand to acknowledge Bill Clinton’s transgressions.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Looking Ahead to Trump’s Year Two A glance at the biggest challenges — and how to surmount them. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on December 28th, 2017

President Trump’s first year ended with the biggest tax reform since 1986, the most consequential of a list of achievements that have made a good start at rolling back Barack Obama’s runaway expansion of the Leviathan state. At the same time, the hysterical “resistance” of the Dems and progressives, abetted by Republican NeverTrumpers, continues its bizarre attacks on the president, feeding off his blunt twitter commentary and obsessing over his brash style rather than focusing on his notable actions.

As year two of the improbable Trump presidency begins, this conflict remains central to our political drama. But what does it portend for Trump’s program and the critical midterm elections?

Lost in the anti-Trump media frenzy has been, according to the White House, 81 significant rollbacks of the progressive assault on the Constitutional order. The most important was the appointment of originalist Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. That win, along with 12 Appeals Court appointments of similarly minded judges, will shape our government for decades, and survive any future swing back to the Dems. Tax reform will also likely survive, since the left almost never repeals tax cuts to the middle class. Cutting the regulations that metastasized under Obama has saved $8 billion so far, and encouraged the economy’s “animal spirits,” leading to three quarters of more than 3% growth in GDP, 1.7 million new jobs, a stock market up 28%, unemployment at its lowest since December 2000, and economic confidence at a 17-year high.

Throw in opening up more than a million acres to oil exploration and drilling, hastening Obamacare’s demise by eliminating the individual mandate, discarding the economically toxic Paris Climate Accords, reining in the job-killing EPA, getting serious about border enforcement, deporting thousands of illegal aliens, paring back our suicidal open-door immigration policies, and challenging political correctness almost daily, and Trump’s record on the domestic front points to a good start on growing the economy and getting the dead hand of big government out of the country’s business.

On foreign policy, Trump has begun to repair the damage to our international prestige wrought by Obama’s subjection of our country to the one-world, naïve internationalism favored by progressives, who want to diminish America’s global clout and reduce the U.S. to a “partner,” as Obama said in Cairo, “mindful of his own imperfections.” He increased sanctions on Iran and refused to recertify Obama’s disastrous agreement with the nuke-hungry mullahs; bombed a Syrian airfield and destroyed a fifth of Assad’s jet fighters; took the gloves off our military and ended ISIS’s “caliphate”; rolled back Obama’s cringing concessions to Cuba; put Russia on notice by recommitting to the Magnitsky Act and increasing sanctions on regime oligarchs; began work on strengthening military readiness and antimissile defence; gave a rousing defense of Western Civilization in Poland; visited world capitals to project America’s renewed confidence and willingness to defend its security and interests; unleashed U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley to scold and scorn the anti-American pygmy states infesting that “cockpit in the Tower of Babel,” to borrow Churchill’s phrase; and announced that the U.S recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and promised to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital. Under Trump, America seems to be getting its international mojo back.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Terror on Russian Shoppers ‘Tis the season for Jihad. December 28, 2017 Matthew Vadum

Posted By on December 28th, 2017

A Christmas season bombing of a supermarket in Russia’s second-largest city suggests that killing in the name of Islam never goes out of season.

In addition to being a time for end-of-the-year reflection, Christmas is also a popular time for Muslim terrorists to kill Christians and Jews, and sometimes, other Muslims, too.

Yuletide terrorist attacks seem to be becoming the new normal in several countries – and the Christmas season isn’t over yet in Russia. Eastern Orthodox Christians in Russia won’t celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth until Sunday, Jan. 7, more than a week from now.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the Wednesday evening bombing in Saint Petersburg that sent 10 people to the hospital, but Islamists are thought to have figured in a suicide bombing in the city’s subway system that left more than a dozen dead and 50 wounded in April.

The explosion took place at the Perekrestok market. At that time, thousands of people were present in the shopping complex housing the market. The source of the blast was a homemade bomb packed with shrapnel. The bomb had reportedly been concealed in a locker.

The bombing comes after Russian President Vladimir Putin called President Donald Trump earlier in the month to thank him for a CIA tip that helped head off bombings that Islamic State had planned for the city.

On Dec. 21 a 32-year-old Muslim man named Saeed Noori drove his car into a crowd of people in Melbourne, Australia, injuring 19, three of them critically, according to reports. The Australian citizen entered that country in 2004 as a refugee from Afghanistan.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Mueller Test and the Paper Civil War on Trump A last ditch effort by the establishment to wrest control from the president. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 28th, 2017

The original civil war was fought by farmhands and factory workers, freed slaves and young boys turned soldiers; the new civil war is being fought by lawyers in blue or gray suits not with bullets, but with bullet points.

From the Mueller investigation to Federal judges declaring that President Trump doesn’t have the right to control immigration policy or command the military, from political sabotage at the DOJ by Obama appointees like Sally Yates to Patagonia’s lawsuit over national monuments, the cold civil war set off by the left’s rejection of the 2016 election results has been a paper war largely waged by lawyers.

“The biggest threat to New Yorkers right now is the federal government,” Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York recently declared. The radical leftist pol who had once vowed to do everything possible to elect Hillary Clinton was explaining his hundred lawsuits against the government on everything from net neutrality to the travel ban meant to keep out the Islamic terrorists running over tourists near Ground Zero and bombing commuters in the tunnels off Times Square.

Islamic terrorists have killed thousands of people in New York City in the last two decades. Net neutrality’s current death toll hovers around zero. The Federal government is far less of a threat to New Yorkers than their own government which insists that Islamic terrorists should be able to kill them. But it is a great threat to a class of political lawyers whose ranks include AG Schneiderman, Hawaii’s Judge Derrick Watson, Mueller’s team, Sally Yates, the ACLU and countless other #resistance combatants.

The blatant secessionism of the AG’s premise is no longer extraordinary. Not when California’s Jerry Brown tours the world signing independent environmental treaties. Schneiderman is one of a number of blue state attorney generals who have decided that their primary focus shouldn’t be enforcing the law, but resisting the Federal government. But Scheiderman is also articulating the central tenet of the new #resistance which, despite Antifa’s antics, is more dedicated to legal sabotage than actual violence.

It’s still a paper civil war. For now.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Women at the New York Times Are Sharpening Their Knives By John Ellis

Posted By on December 28th, 2017

A well-established trajectory of witch hunts is that eventually, the purge will turn in on itself. Regarding the left’s efforts to upend perceived power structures through the redefining of men (as a group) as sexual predators, the left is finding that the sights on the identity politics cannon have been trained back on them. After the New York Times announced that embattled White House reporter Glenn Thrush would be keeping his job after his suspension in the wake of sexual harassment allegations, reports began to emerge that the women employed by the newspaper are expressing their concern for how the Gray Lady treats members of the fairer sex.

On November 20, Vox published an article by the website’s editorial director Laura McGann reporting claims that Thrush preyed on women working in political journalism. The bombshell of the article was McGann relating her own uncomfortable encounter with Thrush. McGann wrote that he “slid into my side of the booth, blocking me in. I was wearing a skirt, and he put his hand on my thigh. He started kissing me. I pulled myself together and got out of there, shoving him on my way out.”

Almost immediately after McGann’s story broke, the New York Times suspended Thrush and began conducting an investigation. A month later, the Times reported that Thrush would be returning to work, but with a different assignment. In a statement, the Times’ lawyer Charlotte Behrendt said, “While we believe that Glenn has acted offensively, we have decided that he does not deserve to be fired.”

Reporting on the NYT’s in-house fallout, HuffPost says,”The announcement set off a wave of indignation among Times observers, who thought it sent a message that the paper condones sexual misconduct and isn’t concerned about the safety of its female employees. But among the female Times employees who spoke to HuffPost, the takeaway was less about the dangers of sexual misbehavior and more about who actually matters at the paper.”

“We’re not really sure what the message is here,” one woman told HuffPost. “I feel really conflicted.”

According to HuffPost, another woman lamented that “while the Times took careful steps to nurture and protect its star male reporter, there were loads of women struggling to get help with flat-lining careers inside the newsroom. For her, the Thrush decision was another painful reminder of how the Times is failing its female reporters.”

In an internal survey, the Times has discovered that many of its female employees feel undervalued and unsure of how to advance their careers.

ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

James Zogby Arab DNC Leader Denounces Rachel Ray’s ‘Cultural Genocide’ in Calling Food ‘Israeli’ By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on December 28th, 2017

James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a member of the Executive Committee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and a board member of the Bernie Sanders think tank The Sanders Institute, denounced a tweet as “cultural genocide.”

Celebrity cook Rachel Ray posted a picture of stuffed grape leaves, hummus, beet dip, eggplant, tabbouli, and sun-dried tomato dip, describing the “holiday feast” as an “Israeli nite.”

This unleashed a storm of controversy, with various commentators claiming the feast was actually “Levantine.”

Zogby jumped into the fray, declaring, “Damn it Rachel Ray. This is cultural genocide. It’s not Israeli food. It’s Arab (Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian). First the Israelis take the land & ethnically cleanse it of Arabs. Now they take their food & culture & claim it’s theirs too! Shame.”Bret Stephens, an op-ed contributor for The New York Times, was aghast. “Please tell me this is a joke tweet, James Zogby,” he tweeted. “Or is it ‘cultural genocide’ when Arabs use Israeli technology? Do you use Instant Messaging? Waze? If so, please stop.”Zogby doubled down. “The equivalent would be if I start using IM & Waze & then declare them Lebanese technology,” he replied. “This isn’t a joke. It’s about a history of cultural appropriation & a systematic effort to erase Palestinian history & culture. Peace is possible, but not on those terms.”

Stephens shot back, “Hummus seems to have first been mentioned as a Cairene food in the 13th century or so. Maybe Maimonides came up with it.” If this suggestion is correct, hummus would be Jewish — as Moses Maimonides was a prominent medieval Jewish philosopher.

“Who knows? Who cares? Why not just enjoy it instead of declaring ‘cultural genocide’ and making a fool of ourself?” Stephens concluded. CONTINUE AT SITE

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Washington’s Carbon Overreach Another rebuke to climate change rule by executive diktat.

Posted By on December 28th, 2017

Washington Governor Jay Inslee calls climate change an “existential threat,” and he has channeled President Obama in using executive powers to impose his policy response. But like Mr. Obama he suffered a major blow this month when a Washington court ruled that he exceeded his authority under state law.

Washington lawmakers have declined to pass Mr. Inslee’s signature cap-and-trade legislation, and in 2016 voters rejected a carbon-tax ballot measure. So “now we have to do it administratively,” the Sierra Club’s Doug Howell said last year.

Mr. Inslee suddenly discovered authority to act unilaterally under the Washington Clean Air Act and a 2008 law that required greenhouse gas reductions. The Department of Ecology’s subsequent Clean Air Rule required the state’s largest emitters to reduce carbon emissions by 1.7% annually, or else buy carbon credits or invest in carbon-offsets.

This sweeping regulation affected manufacturers, waste facilities and government buildings, and it imposed a de facto tax on “indirect emitters” like oil and natural gas suppliers. Regardless of their actual emissions, the Inslee Administration wanted to penalize businesses for peddling energy products it doesn’t like. And it estimated that indirect emitters were responsible for around three-fourths of the carbon emissions covered under the regulation—though they can’t control what others emit.