FOREIGN POLICY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The State Department is boycotting Trump’s Jerusalem Policy: Seth Lipsky

Posted By on December 14th, 2017

Now that President Trump has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, what will the State Department do? It resents Israel and has been fighting the Jewish state for years. Is it ready to comply?

Don’t bet on it. That’s my advice.

Foggy Bottom is the worst swamp in Washington, haunted by the ghost of Loy Henderson, the diplomat who tried to defeat the very idea of Israel.

He lost decisively 70 years ago, when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, clearing the way for a Jewish state. And, in May 1948, when President Harry Truman recognized Israel 11 minutes after it declared independence. He overruled the vociferous objections of the State Department.

State has dragged its heels ever since. It has sought at every turn not only to stymie Israel but to block any recognition of Jerusalem as its capital.

Now the question to watch will be the case of a 15-year-old American boy named Menachem Zivotofsky, who was born in Jerusalem in 2002.

Congress wanted him — and all Americans born in Jerusalem — to have the right to have their passport say they were born in Israel. (Now it only says “Jerusalem.”) It passed a law saying so. The Senate was unanimous.

Yet Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama refused to comply. State Secretaries Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were in the Senate that passed the law without objection. Even so, they fought Israel in court.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ugly as Mueller’s investigation may look, it’s on track to clear Trump: Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on December 14th, 2017

There was a rush to judgment last week on Peter Strzok, a top FBI counterintelligence agent and one of the lead agents on the Hillary Clinton emails investigation, after revelations that Strzok exchanged text messages during the 2016 campaign with an FBI lawyer that were pro-Clinton and anti-Trump. The lawyer was Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

Like Strzok, Page worked on both the Clinton probe and on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia.

In light of the obvious appearance of bias, Mueller rightly removed Strzok from the Trump-Russia case. (Page had already left the investigation.) Nevertheless, Strzok and the Mueller investigation were slammed as Clintonian pillars of anti-Trump animus. Not only were there calls for a purge of possibly corrupt bureaucrats in the FBI and Justice Department, but one Fox News host asserted that these government lawyers and agents should be “taken out in handcuffs” and “locked up.”

Interesting thing: Mueller recently took a guilty plea from Michael Flynn, fleetingly President Trump’s national security adviser, for lying in an FBI interview. News that the interview was conducted by Strzok added fuel to the bias fire.

Yet, as the Wall Street Journal reported last week, former FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee in closed session last March that the agents who interviewed Flynn believed he had been truthful. Far from railroading Flynn (and, derivatively, Trump), it appears that Strzok and Comey’s FBI did not seek his prosecution. That decision was made months later, by Mueller’s investigators. It was based on additional investigation, which is hard to depict as skewed since Flynn, after all, has admitted his guilt.

There is significant reason to be concerned about investigative bias.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

When Students Kill Important College Courses Carol Iannone

Posted By on December 14th, 2017

A version of this article originally appeared at Minding the Campus on November 6, 2017.

The Abolition of Man is the best refutation of moral relativism that has ever seen print (aside from the Bible, of course). In this short and cogent book, C.S. Lewis ponders what happens when human beings abrogate transcendent moral law and objective truth, and begin to fashion their own guidelines for living. One argument that he refutes is that “Man” needs not to observe old, age-encrusted commandments handed down from the Year One, but can decide the course of his own future through reason and deliberation.

Lewis responds, simply, that “Man” will not make such decisions, but a certain number of men who have the power in any given generation will do so, depending on the technology available to them, and that these decisions will then bind the generations afterward. “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases,” Lewis explains, actually means “the power of some men to make other men what theyplease.”

Furthermore, Lewis argues, these powerful men will not necessarily act out of reason and deliberation, but, bypassing objective standards of truth, will be governed by their own “impulses.”

Lewis particularly faults the moral relativists for not considering, as physicists routinely must, the dimension of Time in their actions and calculations. Lewis is thinking in terms of generations. When we consider curricular changes propelled by students at a university, we are dealing with a much shorter timeline, four years really, the amount of time it takes most students to earn the degree, at least at the more selective schools–the ones who will earn the degree, that is, and not drop out altogether. So, at present, we are talking about changes demanded by, say, members of the Class of 2022, that will affect all future students in that particular college through the 2020s and into the 2030s and even the 2040s, some of them now obliviously playing video games, some toddling about their play groups, some not yet even born.

This prospective scenario may be playing out now at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. As Peter Wood writes at Minding the Campus, “a slow-motion protest” is being mounted at Reed by the “Reedies Against Racism,” who are

waging war on the college’s core humanities course, Humanities 110, “Greece and the Ancient Mediterranean.” The students seem to have gained the upper hand in their attack on Reed’s only required freshman course. Classes have been canceled; a day-long boycott was launched; a Black Lives Matter group presented the president of the college with a list of demands, and President John Kroger capitulated to many of them.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Jihadi Art at John Jay College by Peter Wood

Posted By on December 14th, 2017

This article originally appeared in Minding the Campus on December 3, 2017.

In the sunken lobby of John Jay College of Criminal Justice on Tenth Avenue in New York City, a somber Memorial Hall is dedicated to the “Bravery and Sacrifice” of “NYPD Heroes 9-11 and Beyond.” Surrounded by photographs of the attack and the recovery, a twisted metal chunk of one of the Twin Towers rests on a circular black pedestal inscribed with the names of John Jay alumni killed in the attack.

Take the elevator to the sixth-floor offices of the college president, however, and the mood changes. There you will find in “The President’s Gallery” a celebratory exhibit of art created by the friends and allies of the 9-11 terrorists. The show, running to January 26, is titled “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay.” It is attracting quite a bit of attention. While I was there I ran into a film crew from CBS arranging a tour with one of the curators, Erin Thompson. A fellow exhibit attendee offered the CBS folks the perspective of—her words—“the mother of a victim of 9-11.” Her son (or perhaps daughter) was one of the 648 employees of the Wall Street trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald, who were on the 101st to 105thfloors of the North Tower that day.

No Repentance for Monstrous Acts

“Ode to the Sea” presents 31 paintings, three model boats, and one assemblage titled “The Hall of Enlightenment,” which combines a stopped clock and an open book. The title of the exhibit is taken from the title of a poem by one of the inmates, Ibrahim al-Rubaish. It begins:

O Sea, give me news of my loved ones.

Were it not for the chains of the faithless,
I would have dived into you.
And reached my beloved family, or perished in your arms.

Your beaches are sadness, captivity, pain, and injustice.
Your bitterness eats away at my patience.

Al-Rubaish was a senior leader of Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Captured in Pakistan, he was released from Guantánamo in 2006 and sent into custody to Saudi Arabia. He escaped from the Saudis and went to Yemen where he resumed a leadership position in Al Qaida. He was killed in a drone strike in April 2015.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

MARILYN PENN: BIPOLAR DEMOCRATS

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

In a serendipitous bit of typesetting, two opposing views of human nature are posted in Saturday’s Times. On the op-ed page are Gail Collins and Greg Weiner, each propounding the justice of forcing Al Franken to resign; the former stressing his refusal to accept total responsibility for his vaguely remembered misdeeds, the latter insisting that a statesman’s character is paramount in his calling and his role is to “refine and enlarge,” not simply reflect the public’s views (Federalist 10 NYT op-ed 12/9/17) Then, on the back page is an article about Judge Jack Weinstein calling for more alternatives in sentencing violent offenders facing prison.

The Al Franken lynch-mob sees his non-violent transgressions as rendering him unfit for his elected office and have no pangs of conscience on drastically affecting his career and life. The judge is worried about violent men “who have been trapped in a gang culture, and condemned to a life of poverty and probable crime.” The particular young men in this case broke into a family’s apartment where five children under ten witnessed the gun wielders terrify and rob the victims. Collins and Weiner have no truck with mercy for Franken, a comedian at the time he committed the heinous act of posing for a picture that simulated groping a sleeping woman. The judge has so much mercy that he surely short-changes those law-abiding men of East New York who have sufficient character and determinatiion to graduate from school, get jobs and avoid lives of crime. The giveaway is his viewing the criminals as “condemned” to their lifestyle, as opposed to having opted for it as a quicker more lucrative path than the daily drudge of school and work.

Kristen Gillibrand, our New York senator who got the job largely through monetary and political help of both Clintons, had this to say about the current epidemic of cleansing society of abusive males: “I think when we start having to talk about the differences between sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping you are having the wrong conversation. You need to draw a line in the sand and say none of it is ok.” (Capitol News Conference) What would Judge Weinstein say to this type of non-differential thinking if the senator were representing one of the criminals in his courtroom? Is an unwanted grope really no different than a rape? And if we condemn those who are tried in the court of public opinion for deeds committed years and decades ago, why not ask Ms. Gillibrand to resign for having accepted the favors of a man who committed perjury and didn’t need to search his memory. All of us could see the truth as plainly as that finger wagging across our tv screens protesting that he “had not had sex with that woman” – the one whose dress was stained with DNA from an appendage that yielded far more credible evidence than that lying finger.

Democrats and feminists who supported Bill then, now have to decide whether it’s better to admit to being hypocrites or stick with being too dense to make distinctions between sexual harassment and sexual assault. They also must ask themselves how their movement has failed to give its constituency the necessary gumption to stand up for themselves in the workplace. Rules about sexual harassment have been in place since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and many women have availed themselves of this recourse. After all the talk of giving women a voice, are we really willing to settle for applauding women who, years after the fact, slink into the groupthink hashtagmetoo? What can we say about the women who preferred saying nothing and collecting large sums of money for their silence? At the same time that we accept the stories women tell without the need for independent corroboration, we are encouraging a stampede of indiscriminate firings that give the lie to the notion of due process. Senator McCarthy had more to go on than the senators who just killed Al Franken with an act of meaningless hypocrisy. Al would have had a better shot in Judge Weinstein’s criminal court than with the esteemed jury of his senatorial peers.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Target: New York Another terror attack in America’s biggest city reminds us of the ongoing threat—and the problems with U.S. immigration policy. Seth Barron

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

Two attacks on Manhattan in the last six weeks by ISIS-inspired terrorists demonstrate that the jihadi threat is serious and real. Sayfullo Saipov, the Uzbeki national who murdered eight people with a truck on Halloween, and Akayed Ullah, the Bangladeshi whose pipe bomb appears to have detonated prematurely in the subway system this morning, are adherents of a radical ideology that urges armed struggle against the West. They’re also recent immigrants to the United States, each arriving around 2010 from their respective countries.

According to New York’s political leadership, these terrorists attack America—and New York City, in particular—because they hate our policy of openness to the world. “We are a target by many who would like to make a statement against democracy, against freedom,” said Governor Andrew Cuomo at a press conference this morning. “We have the Statue of Liberty in our harbor and that makes us an international target.” Seconding this theme, Mayor de Blasio announced, “the choice of New York is always for a reason: we are a beacon to the world and we actually show that a society of many backgrounds and many faiths can work . . . and our enemies want to undermine that.”

If we’re to take this logic to its conclusion, Saipov and Ullah acted in violent opposition to American immigration policy. They hate the fact that the United States, alone among the world’s major countries, admits unskilled migrants in huge numbers, and allows recent non-citizen immigrants to sponsor their family members to come here, virtually without limit. According to New York’s governor and mayor, the visa status of Saipov and Ullah is irrelevant (and unmentionable). What’s important is to recognize that these jihadis hate multiculturalism and open borders.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Double Standards and Distortions The media condemns President Trump for “normalizing hatred”—while it looks the other way on Islamist violence and black-nationalist hatred.Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

Political elites on both sides of the Atlantic are still frothing over President Donald Trump’s retweeting of three videos recording Muslims acting badly. The videos originated with a reviled British organization, Britain First, deemed a hate group by the British establishment for linking Britain’s high levels of Muslim immigration to incidents of Islamic terrorism. One such video, from 2013, shows a Muslim cleric in a Syrian village deliberately shattering a terra cotta statue of the Virgin Mary. The second, also from 2013, shows a scene of civil anarchy in Alexandria, Egypt, in which Islamists push two teenagers off a turret onto a lower roof level and beat at least one to death. The third, from May 2017, allegedly shows a Muslim teenager in the Netherlands push over a white boy on crutches and repeatedly kick him while he is on the ground.

By retweeting, Trump was “normalizing hatred,” according to elite opinion. He ignored the “context” of events, claimed the New York Times—such as the fact that the icon-smasher was not just a “Muslim,” as identified in the original tweet, but an extremist cleric whose group had previously destroyed another Mary statue in his village. Why that “context” should defuse concern about the spread of radical Islamic ideology is mysterious. Likewise, while it’s true that the fatal stomping in Egypt occurred during a time of civil and political unrest, that “context” does not change the reality of remorseless violence.

As for the third video, the media and Dutch officials pounced on the fact that the tweets identified the teen assailant as a Muslim migrant, when he was in fact born in the Netherlands. Thus, his Muslim identity is allegedly irrelevant. This is the familiar strategy whenever a second-generation Muslim commits an act of terrorism in the West (which this assault clearly was not): the fact that the terrorist was not a first-generation immigrant supposedly means that Islamist terrorism is not an immigration problem. To the contrary, terrorism by second-generation Muslim immigrants is more of an immigration problem than first-generation terrorism, since it shows a failure to assimilate Western values.

The fury that Trump’s tweets have inspired is hard to square with cable news’ predilection for running endless repeats of videos showing police-officer use of force against civilians. If the media ever provided “context” for those videos, it passed by too fast for the eye to catch. That context might include the suspect’s behavior leading up to the officer’s use of force or the 911 calls that triggered an officer’s investigation—such as the Cleveland police dispatcher’s report of a black male who “keeps pulling a gun out of his pants and pointing it at people,” which led to the tragic shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, who was doing just that with an exact replica toy pistol. It could include the number of armed robberies and drive-by shootings in a neighborhood to explain how an officer might assess the risk of armed violence from a resisting suspect.

This context is almost never offered, however, en route to the false narrative that we’re living through an epidemic of police violence against black males. The media’s stoking of that narrative has had a far greater effect on the nation’s crime rate and on race relations than Trump’s retweets have had on public perceptions of Islamic violence.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Port Authority Jihadist Charged with Federal Terrorism Crimes Obama is gone, but ‘violent extremism’ is still seen as a law-enforcement issue By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

The terrorism charges filed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday against the Port Authority jihadist underscore that, while the rhetoric from the White House is different, the change of administrations from Obama to Trump has not altered the Justice Department’s approach to terrorism: It is regarded principally as a law-enforcement issue, and its connection to Islamic doctrine goes studiously unnoticed.

The five-count complaint filed by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York charges that Akayed Ullah, by attempting a mass-murder attack, materially supported the Islamic State terror network (ISIS). Ullah was scorched in the blast, and a few people near him suffered relatively minor injuries. Fortunately, he failed to kill and maim, as he told police he had hoped to do, a goal made manifest by his plan to strike at the height of the morning rush in one of the world’s busiest transportation hubs.

The 27-year-old Bangladesh native became a permanent resident alien through a combination of reckless government immigration policies — the visa lottery, by which his uncle got in, and chain migration, which enabled Ullah to follow in 2011. The complaint alleges that he was “inspired” by the Islamic State, law-enforcement parlance for a terrorist who is not a member of the “inspirational” jihadist organization or otherwise directed by it (i.e., no “operational” connection).

In the politically correct fashion that confuses the medium with the message, the government asserts that Ullah’s “radicalization” began three years ago and consisted of “view[ing] pro-ISIS materials online.” In other words, the Internet is the culprit.

Of course, it is actually sharia-supremacist ideology that “radicalizes” young Muslims. Typically, they imbibe it not merely through the Internet but by immersing themselves at extremist mosques and in communities in which the ideology is prevalent. Regardless of how the ideology is conveyed, it is the fervor of religious obligation that it incorporates, not the fact that it is easily found online, that explains its power. To grasp this, it is necessary to face up to the fact that the ideology is drawn from Islamic scripture and supported by centuries of fundamentalist scholarship. It is a frightening construction of Islam, but a well-rooted one, which is why so many devout Muslims fall prey to it.

Alas, it remains verboten in the Justice Department to acknowledge the obvious. The complaint thus tells us that Ullah was taken in by “violent extremist ideology” — as if he could as easily have been “inspired” by Antifa as by ISIS.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islamic Extremism: Who is Purest of Them All? by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

In the twentieth century, targets were churches and synagogues; today, they are churches, synagogues, mosques, temples — wherever there is a faith, even a Muslim one, that these Islamic fundamentalists want to “purify”.

Radical Islam has declared war on the pillars of the West: modernity, science, rationalism, tolerance, equality under the law, freedom of expression and the dignity of the individual, to name only a few. Many of these ideas are currently under threat in Western Europe.

Many Europeans might sentimentally think of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims pouring into Europe as “the new Jews” – even though their culture is virtually opposite to the Jews’ — but perhaps the Europeans should be aware that they have now forced the Jews to flee twice in the modern era.

Islamists are erasing civilizations. Is Europe’s next?

The number of victims in the jihadist attack at a Sufi Mosque in Egypt has risen to 305 and is destined to rise even more. Inside this number there is another one, even more tragic: the 27 children murdered by Islamic terrorists. It has been not only one of the world’s most sickening terror attacks since 9/11. It was, in intent, a genocidal attack aimed to erase a religion and a community from the face of earth.

The murder of children is the most ruthless face of the war that radical Islam has declared: Palestinian children used as human shields by Hamas, Israeli children butchered in buses and cars, Iraqi children massacred by smiling terrorists with candy, French children brought as recruits to Raqqa, Iranian children sent by the Ayatollah Khomeini to Iranian camps, Christian children wiped out by the Taliban in Pakistan, Western children murdered in Barcelona, Manchester and Nice, and the children of Beslan forced to drink their own urine before being killed. How much longer will we have to update the ferocity of radical Islam?

Some Muslim writers have compared the savagery of extremist Muslims to that of the Nazis. In his novel “Le village de l’Allemande”, the Muslim Algerian writer Boualem Sansal compared the similarities: “Single party, militarization, propaganda, falsification of history, xenophobia, affirmation of a plot hatched by Israel and the United States, etc.” According to another Muslim dissident, Naser Khader, “the radical Muslims are the Nazis of Islam”.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Locked up in the Islamic Republic of Iran by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

What is genuinely troubling was the way in which Robert Levinson’s fate has been kept largely secret. The Iranian authorities have never revealed who captured him, who currently holds him, what charges have been laid against him, or even if he is still alive. And no effort has been made to negotiate his release, set a prison term, or work by the rules of international intelligence or diplomacy.

An Iranian revolutionary court charged Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, without the slightest evidence, of “plotting to topple the Iranian regime”. This was done in a trial without a defence lawyer, without any details of her “offence”, and ended in a sentence to five years in prison.

All of you will be familiar with articles on individuals who have been imprisoned, tortured, or even executed in several Muslim countries. Many such individuals are Iranians, imprisoned unjustly for their beliefs or actions that would be considered perfectly innocent or even praiseworthy in the West. Since the revolution of 1979, Iran has been not only the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, but also one of the world’s most consistent human rights abusers. In Amnesty International’s most recent (2016-2017) report on rights issues in the country, it listed abuses under numerous headings:

Freedom of expression, association and assembly
Torture and other ill-treatment
Unfair trials
Freedom of religion and belief
Discrimination – ethnic minorities
Women’s rights
Death penalty

Iran has the sixth highest number of prisoners in the world, although it comes only nineteenth in the size of its population. In 2011, there were 250,000 prisoners overall, a figure that dropped by 2014 to 225,624 — still a very high figure. Even North Korea — which has a vast range of political prison camps, forced labour camps, and other facilities, albeit with a small overall population — has fewer: the U.S. State Department human rights report for 2016 says that estimates of the prison population total range between 80,000 and 120,000.

Iran is also notorious for the number of executions it carries out, often for drug-related crimes, but also on religious and political charges. In an article by Iran expert Majid Rafizadeh, president of the International American Council (IAC), Iran has overtaken China as the world’s worst offender in extreme use of execution as a punishment, often for offences that would not even carry penalties in any Western country, including the United States:

Since January 2016, Iran has executed at least 230 people, that is at least one person a day on average. The number of executions has recently increased and Iran ranks first in the world, followed by China, when it comes to executions per capita. Iran executed approximately 1000 people in 2015.

In the Amnesty International report on Iran, there appears one paragraph of considerable concern for foreign citizens and Iranians with dual nationality, notably US and British citizenship:

Several foreign nationals and Iranians with dual nationality were detained in Tehran’s Evin Prison with little or no access to their families, lawyers and consular officials. These prisoners were sentenced to long prison terms on vague charges such as “collaborating with a hostile government” after grossly unfair trials before Revolutionary Courts. The authorities accused the prisoners of being involved in a foreign-orchestrated “infiltration project” pursuing the “soft overthrow” of Iran. In reality, the convictions appeared to stem from their peaceful exercise of the rights to freedom of expression and association.