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Covert ‘Arabization’ Threatens Moderate Islam in Africa Burkina Faso welcomes foreign charities and NGOs, but they insist on importing a rigid form of the faith. By Joop Koopman see note please

Posted By on September 9th, 2017

The suspected Islamist terror attack on a restaurant in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on August 14 made headlines briefly, until the carnage in Barcelona took center stage three days later. The killing of 18 people in the capital of the small francophone country was practically a mirror image of the terror attack that left 29 dead in a hotel in Burkina Faso in January 2016. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) claimed responsibility for that assault.

In both cases coverage focused on the infiltration of jihadist extremists who are prepared to shed innocent blood to keep Westerners and Western investment out of the country and who are committed to paving the way, in the manner of ISIS and Boko Haram, for the eventual establishment of an Islamic caliphate on the African continent

Meanwhile, flying well below the radar is what some call the “Arabization” of Burkina Faso and other poor and underdeveloped African countries with significant Muslim populations. It takes the form of scholarships offered to impoverished youth who are invited to study in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or Kuwait. They return schooled in a far more rigid, intolerant form of Islam. It clashes with the tranquil, easygoing ways of the faith as it has developed in certain African cultures, where it has been shaped by the peaceful strands of Sufism and mixed with animist beliefs and practices. “Arabization” is an effort to purify Islam according to the strict standards of the Wahhabi and Salafi sects.

That push is evident also in the work of non-governmental organizations from the Arabian Peninsula that are active in Burkina Faso. Prominent among them is Qatar Charity, one of the biggest Persian Gulf aid organizations. It is active in numerous countries, including the United Kingdom and France. The U.S. government has accused Qatar Charity of financing al-Qaeda. In Burkina Faso, Qatar Charity and similar NGOs operate subtly: Development projects, such as the digging of wells, go hand in hand with bringing preachers into the country from Pakistan and Qatar; the NGOs also build Koranic schools and social centers that help promulgate Wahhabism.

NGOs provide funding for the repair and construction of roadways, with projects often undertaken on the condition that local authorities allow for the building of mosques every so many miles — mosques run by highly conservative if not radical imams who are chosen by the NGOs. These NGOs work on hundreds of projects each year, all of them designed to benefit only the country’s Muslim population.

This Arabization is not necessarily tantamount to radicalization, at least not at this relatively early stage. Nonetheless, the import of stricter forms of Islam poses a threat to the comity that has long existed between Burkina Faso’s Muslims, about 60 percent of the population, and its Christians, just under a quarter.

Particularly at the village level, the unique bond between Catholics and Muslims has been expressed in their celebration of each other’s major feast days and other important occasions, such as the appointment of a new bishop. But since Arabization, a certain chill has begun to affect these bonds of friendship, particularly where the newly constructed mosques dot the cityscapes. This new wariness also reflects resentment that, although the Muslim majority holds economic power in the country, two Christians — President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré and Prime Minister Paul Kaba Thieba, both of them Catholics — steer the ship of state.

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Trump Nominates Greg Katsas to the D.C. Circuit This is a home run for the president. By Shannen W. Coffin

Posted By on September 9th, 2017

Conservatives who voted for Donald Trump based on his promises to restore the integrity of the judiciary had a point. If there was one compelling reason to support Trump, even for those who harbored serious concerns about his readiness for office, it was that a loss in the 2016 election would render the judicial branch of the federal government a taxpayer-funded subsidiary of the Democratic party for a generation or more. Where Hillary Clinton had her litmus tests, Trump promised to appoint judges who understood the limited role of federal judges in our constitutional system, who respected the text of the Constitution and federal statutes, and who would not let their personal policy preferences dictate the results of the cases before them.

Many conservatives voted for Trump in the hope that he would keep those promises, and in the first eight months of his administration, he has. Along with a sustained rollback of Obama-era regulations, Trump’s judicial appointments — with Justice Neil Gorsuch as the centerpiece — have been key successes for an often-troubled administration. Just this week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on two tremendously qualified nominees to courts of appeals in the Midwest: Michigan supreme-court justice and former University of Michigan law professor Joan Larsen, and Notre Dame law professor Amy Barrett. Both are former clerks to Justice Antonin Scalia who will prove to be judicial conservatives. Larsen and Barrett are both names to remember, as both are likely to be short-listers for a future Supreme Court vacancy.

Trump continued his promising run today with the nomination of my friend and former colleague Gregory Katsas to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit left by the retirement of Bush appointee Janice Rogers Brown. Katsas, who currently serves as deputy White House counsel, has a legal résumé that would be difficult to match. An executive editor of the Harvard Law Review during his law-school years, Katsas clerked on the Third Circuit and D.C. Circuit Courts of Appeals. He then followed his then-boss Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, clerking for Justice Thomas in his first term on the high court.

Katsas then spent a decade in private practice for a prestigious law firm in Washington, D.C., before joining the Justice Department in the early days of the George W. Bush administration. There, Greg oversaw the appellate section of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, where he argued dozens of the most challenging and important appeals facing the Bush administration — cases involving the defense of the homeland in the aftermath of September 11, challenges to the president’s prosecution of the war on terrorism, and the federal ban on partial-birth abortion, and many more cases involving critical constitutional principles. Katsas served the entire eight years in the Bush administration, eventually being appointed as assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Division.

In both government and private practice, Katsas has argued cases before the Supreme Court — he was one of the lawyers who argued the landmark challenge to Obamacare in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius — and in every U.S. court of appeals. In all, he has argued more than 75 appeals.

It is hard to imagine a candidate with greater qualifications to serve on the D.C. Circuit, one of the most important courts of appeals in the country owing to its location in the nation’s capital. The court’s docket, while varied, includes key cases regarding the powers and programs of the federal government. Katsas’s vast experience at the highest levels of that government gives him a perspective that would benefit any nominee to that court.

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Here’s What Defenders of Campus Kangaroo Courts Won’t Tell You By David French

Posted By on September 9th, 2017

It’s Betsy DeVos day here at NR. I’ve got a piece up on the homepage detailing how critics of campus due process rely on junk science and sometimes even sheer malice to prop up failed Obama-era policies, and our editors have expressed their own support for reforming campus Title IX prosecutions. But as you read these pieces and weigh them against the #StopBetsy invective across the web, consider one more thing — state and federal courts are making change inevitable. Universities are losing due process cases from coast to coast.

I’d urge you to read my friend KC Johnson’s excellent, extended piece over at Commentary. It begins:

In late August, U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett blocked Miami University from suspending a student the school had found guilty of sexual assault. The student claimed that his due-process rights had been violated by Miami University’s fact-finding process. This process had featured a proceeding in which all the witnesses corroborating the accuser’s claims had refused to appear—and at its conclusion the chair of Miami’s disciplinary panel simply accepted their unverified statements as “true.” When the case reached federal court, university lawyers argued that cross-examination of the absent witnesses was irrelevant because the accused student was allowed to say that he disagreed with their claims. The university, Barrett responded, misunderstood the importance of cross-examination for assessing witness credibility. Miami’s “claim that no amount of cross-examination could have changed the minds of the hearing panel members,” the judge concluded, “arguably undercuts the fairness of the hearing.” The “arguably” was a nice touch.

Barrett’s decision marked the 59th judicial setback for a college or university since 2013 in a due-process lawsuit brought by a student accused of sexual assault. (In four additional cases, the school settled a lawsuit before any judicial decision occurred.) This body of law serves as a towering rebuke to the Obama administration’s reinterpretation of Title IX, the 1972 law barring sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funding.

Obama administration activists and campus ideologues have imposed procedures that revolt judges across the ideological spectrum. Change isn’t optional. It’s mandatory. Federal government policies are driving universities to violate the civil liberties of their students, and it’s legally unsustainable. Here’s Johnson again:

The process began in May 2013, in a ruling against St. Joseph’s University, and has lately accelerated (15 rulings in 2016 and 21 thus far in 2017). Of the 40 setbacks for colleges in federal court, 14 came from judges nominated by Barack Obama, 11 from Clinton nominees, and nine from selections of George W. Bush. Brown University has been on the losing side of three decisions; Duke, Cornell, and Penn State, two each.

As Johnson notes, the universities don’t always lose, but even when they prevail, they often prevail in the face of deep judicial misgivings about university processes. Moreover, these cases are brought against the backdrop of a very particular judicial bias. As a litigator who’s sued a number of universities on constitutional grounds, I can tell you that federal judges do not want their courts to become glorified student disciplinary boards. Yet the facts are often so egregious — and the constitutional violations so plain — that they often have no choice.

So the next time a campus ideologue says reformers are on the side of “rapists,” remember that their preferred procedures are too radical even for President Obama’s judges. One way or another, their kangaroo courts will come to an end.

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DACA: Trump Does the Full Obama on Prosecutorial Discretion Joining Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, he reaffirms his Democratic predecessor’s sleight of hand. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 9th, 2017

The Donald’s renewed romance with old pals (and donees) “Chuck and Nancy” is already paying more dividends . . . for Democrats. If the president’s tweet on Thursday morning is to be believed (not always a sure thing), he has fully adopted the unconstitutional distortion of prosecutorial discretion employed by President Obama to avoid executing the laws faithfully.

Substance aside, the appearance of the tweet is a story unto itself. Trump was so giddy over sandbagging congressional Republicans and his own Treasury secretary that he called Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday morning to gloat about the positive news coverage — squealing, “The press has been incredible!” Smitten, he wanted to explore other potential areas of appeasement — er, I mean, bipartisan cooperation. This should go well: An all-id-all-the-time POTUS, who cares far more about media commentary than policy, rediscovers that nothing floats the MSM boat quite like a nominal Republican who accommodates Democrats while humiliating his party in the process. Can’t you just feel him evolving!

While she had the infatuated president’s ear, the New York Times relates:

Ms. Pelosi took the opportunity to ask Mr. Trump to send out a message on Twitter emphasizing that the 800,000 immigrants enrolled in a program that he canceled this week can keep their protection from deportation and work permits over the next six months as it phases out.

That program, of course, is DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Contrary to the Gray Lady’s assertion — and as we explained this week — Trump has not canceled DACA. Nor is it being phased out. Trump has signaled that either it will be codified in law or he will continue the program by lawless executive action — as he is doing for the next six months, as he has done for the last eight months, and as his predecessor did for four years.

In any event, as Nancy tells it, “I asked him to do it. Then boom, boom, boom! The tweet appeared and that was good.” You can see why she’d say that. Trump tweeted:

For all of those (DACA) that are concerned about your status during the 6 month period, you have nothing to worry about — No action!

Translation: There is no daylight between Trump and Obama when it comes to ignoring the president’s constitutional duty to execute laws faithfully under the guise of prosecutorial discretion.

To repeat, properly understood, prosecutorial discretion is simply a resource-allocation doctrine. It is an unremarkable recognition of the fact that there are more violations of law than there are law-enforcement assets to investigate and prosecute them. The government has no choice but to prioritize: Serious crimes get the most attention; many less serious crimes, for the most part, are overlooked. But there’s a caveat: While a low priority is assigned to comparatively less serious crimes, they are still considered crimes. The government evaluates each case individually and reserves the right to take action against the low-priority misconduct in appropriate cases — for example, in a case involving a recidivist offender or an otherwise hardcore criminal.

That was not Obama’s practice. He disingenuously invoked “prosecutorial discretion” when, in reality, he was choosing not to enforce congressional statutes to which he objected on policy grounds. Substantially, there was no case-by-case review; just occasional lip service to the notion of individualized treatment when he’d announce non-enforcement directives and “waivers” of this or that statute. As noted above, the exercise of prosecutorial discretion cannot be avoided. If that is all the executive branch is doing, there is no need to make a big announcement about it. The point of decreeing DACA was not to exercise prosecutorial discretion; it was to confer de facto amnesty on a class of DREAMers, as the president — not Congress — defined them.

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DeVos Takes on Lawless Campus Tribunals By The Editors

Posted By on September 9th, 2017

Yesterday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos took a welcome step toward restoring a measure of justice and sanity to American higher education. In a speech at George Mason University — and in a follow-up interview with CBS News — DeVos indicated that she intended to withdraw Obama administration “guidance” on adjudicating sexual-assault claims on campus and replace it with a regulatory rulemaking process that is intended to protect students from sexual assault and preserve essential civil liberties.

It’s hard to overstate the legal and moral necessity of this action. First, let’s deal with the law. In 2011, the Obama administration issued a now-infamous “Dear Colleague” letter that required universities to lower the burden of proof in sexual-assault adjudication to a “preponderance of the evidence” standard (50.1 percent probability) without also adequately preserving essential due-process rights such as access to counsel, access to available evidence, and full and fair cross-examination of witnesses. At the same time, the administration commenced dozens of open-ended investigations of universities — acting on claims that they were insufficiently committed to protecting women from rape and applying the new guidance to evaluate university policies.

These actions were fundamentally lawless. No American administration has the ability to rewrite the law by merely issuing a letter. At the very least, the Obama administration should have conducted a notice-and-comment regulatory rulemaking process in accordance with the Administrative Procedure Act. Even then, the regulation would still have to be consistent with governing federal statutes and comply with the Constitution. But Obama’s Department of Education ignored these steps and instead violated the APA, Title IX, and the Constitution in an ideologically motivated trifecta of campus tyranny.

The result was entirely predictable. Campuses, fearing the loss of federal funds and pushed by their own internal constituencies who pushed ludicrous and discredited claims that up to one in five female students would be sexually assaulted during college, created a vast, morally outrageous, and oppressive system of kangaroo courts. According to a study released this week by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 73.6 percent of America’s top universities don’t guarantee students a presumption of innocence, fewer than half require that fact-finders be impartial, and a full 58.5 percent of institutions don’t “provide students with a meaningful opportunity to cross-examine witnesses” in cases of sexual misconduct. And this is a partial list of university legal failures. All told, 45 of the 53 rated colleges received a “D” or “F” for their commitment to due process.

But those are dry statistics. The individual stories are harrowing, and DeVos provided startling examples in her speech. Schools have punished students even though the alleged “victim” claimed that nothing happened. They’ve investigated and punished professors and students for engaging in First Amendment–protected speech. They’ve refused to allow students to introduce exculpatory evidence. And they’re facing an avalanche of lawsuits from aggrieved students as a result. Brooklyn College professor K. C. Johnson has compiled a list of at least 60 university litigation defeats since the Obama administration issued its “Dear Colleague” letter, and the list often expands by the week.

Schools have been caught between the hammer of an overzealous and lawless Department of Education and the anvil of private litigation. Their choice? Follow the Constitution and potentially lose government funding. Comply with Obama-administration directives and potentially face the wrath of a federal judge.

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Man Up, Mr. Meadows The Congressman has a lean and hungry look. So run for Speaker. (Amen!)

Posted By on September 9th, 2017

The Washington Post reports that defrocked White House aide Steve Bannon and Members of the House Freedom Caucus are plotting a coup to depose Paul Ryan as Speaker later this fall. Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows denied this on Friday on MSNBC, but you can bet something is afoot. And come to think of it, why wait?

If the Freedom Caucus is upset enough to contemplate a mid-session leadership coup, let’s get it on now. Congress is entering a critical few months that will determine whether Republicans will have anything significant to show for their majority. If the fate of this Congress hangs in the balance, then it’s unconscionable to wait and let the House fail. The manly—the patriotic—thing to do is force a debate and vote while there’s still time to save the day.

This has the added advantage of being a stab in the front for a change. The Freedom Caucus specialty is the stab in the back. Claim to be cooperative, to be working constructively toward some legislative compromise, but then at a critical moment raise its demands, vote no and blame the leadership. Soak up the cable-TV appearances and then sit back as someone else cleans up the political mess.

This is how Mr. Meadows played the ObamaCare repeal debate earlier this year. As House leaders and HHS Secretary Tom Price prepared the draft bill, Mr. Meadows was regularly consulted. According to numerous sources, Mr. Meadows’ priority in private discussions was killing any reduction, even a small one, in the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance.

For conservative health economists, this is a crucial policy reform. It would reduce a subsidy that drives up health-care costs, and it would begin to equalize the tax treatment for individual and employer insurance. But Mr. Meadows opposed it as a “tax increase,” a definition which would mean that Congress could never reduce any tax subsidy.

Mr. Meadows worked frantically behind the scenes to make sure there was no change in the tax exclusion, without objecting to other provisions. GOP leaders gave him what he wanted and killed the tax change. But within days Mr. Meadows began trashing the draft bill anyway—this time because it supposedly didn’t reduce insurance costs enough. His assault defeated the first attempt at a House vote, and delay its passage for weeks, helping Democrats build public opposition and making it a much harder lift in the Senate, where it failed.

With this record of accomplishment, clearly it’s time for Mr. Meadows to step into the spotlight and take some leadership responsibility. The honorable act now would be to announce an immediate challenge to Mr. Ryan surrounded by his Freedom Caucus supporters and Mr. Bannon’s Breitbart staff.

Lay out his strategy for passing tax reform, for raising the debt limit, and for passing the Freedom Caucus budget through the House and the Senate this fall. Then the Members of the House GOP conference can hold a debate and vote, and Mr. Meadows and the country can see how much support he has for his political strategy compared to Mr. Ryan.

If Mr. Meadows is too modest, or thinks he can’t win, then perhaps his Freedom Caucus running mate, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, would want to run. And if Mr. Jordan declines the honor, then perhaps Texas Rep. Louis Gohmert will want to exploit the high regard with which he is held by his colleagues.

This is the way a congressional majority is supposed to work. Individuals run for leadership, the Members vote, and then everyone accepts the results and moves on together. That’s what Democrat Steny Hoyer did after he lost to Nancy Pelosi in 2002, and Democrats proceeded to govern in unified fashion after they won the House in 2006.

If Mr. Meadows wants to stage a coup, he should do it publicly by putting his agenda and strategy front and center for everyone to see. Take the dagger out from under the toga, Mark, and show your colleagues that lean and hungry look. Then let’s hold a vote.

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When great institutions lie By Caroline B. Glick

Posted By on September 9th, 2017

Over the past week, two major US institutions have produced studies that discredit their names and reputations as credible organizations. Their actions are important in and of themselves. But they also point to a disturbing trend in the US in which the credibility of important American institutions is being undermined from within by their members who pursue narrow partisan or ideological agendas in the name of their institutions.

The political implications of this larger trend were clearly in evidence in the 2016 presidential election. From a larger, long-term sociological perspective, if the current trend is not reversed the implications for American society will likely be long lasting and deeply destructive.

The first study was produced by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. It dealt with the Obama administration’s policies regarding the war in Syria and specifically the acts of mass murder undertaken by the Assad regime. Authored by Cameron Hudson, a former Obama administration national security official who now serves as the director of the museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, the report absolved the Obama administration of all responsibility of the bloodbath in Syria.

As reported by Tablet magazine, the paper argued that “a variety of factors, which were more or less fixed, made it very difficult from the beginning for the US government to take effective action to prevent atrocities in Syria.”

The paper’s claim was based on “computational modeling and game theory methods, as well as interviews with experts and policy-makers.” It argued that had then-president Barack Obama not ignored his own redline and actually responded with force to the regime’s 2013 chemical weapons attack at Ghouta, it wouldn’t have made a difference.

In the last months of the Obama administration, Obama appointed several of his loyalists, including his deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, to positions on the board of the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Rhodes was one of the architects of Obama’s Syria policy.

After sections of the report were released to Tablet and the report was posted on the museum’s website, its findings were angrily rejected by prominent Jewish communal leaders and human rights activists.

For instance, literary critic Leon Wieseltier told Tablet, “The first thing I have to say is: Shame on the Holocaust Museum.”

He added, “If I had the time I would gin up a parody version of this that will give us the computational- modeling algorithmic counterfactual analysis of [then-US assistant secretary of war] John J. McCloy’s decision not to bomb the Auschwitz ovens in 1944. I’m sure we could concoct the f***ing algorithm for that, too.”

Wieseltier was exactly right. A mathematical model is based on inputs and outputs. If you input specific data, you will get specific consequences. From an academic perspective, the study’s findings are worthless.

In the wake of the firestorm the report provoked, the museum pulled the study from its website and canceled its scheduled formal presentation on September 11.

But the damage that the Holocaust Memorial Museum did to its reputation by producing and publishing a transparently false, politically motivated report is not something that can be mitigated by pulling it from its website.

As some of the Jewish communal leaders, who spoke to Tablet suggested, the Holocaust Memorial Museum diminished its moral authority as an institution by publishing a report clearly produced to rewrite recent history in a manner that absolved the Obama administration of all responsibility for the mass murder in Syria.

While distressing, the impact of the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s action is limited to a historical falsehood. The goal of the second study published this week by an esteemed institution is to distort and indeed block discussion about a problem that is ongoing.

This week, Stanford University’s Research Group in Education and Jewish Studies published a report which purports to show that there is no significant antisemitism on US college campuses and that Jewish students do not feel threatened by antisemitism.

The Stanford’s conclusions fly in the face of a massive body of data, collected by researchers over the past decade, which all show the opposite to be the case. If the Stanford study is believed, it will discredit the work of hundreds of professional researchers and academics, journalists and Jewish and academic leaders throughout the US.

But that’s the thing of it. The Stanford study is utter nonsense.

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MELANIE PHILLIPS: THE AXIS OF DESTRUCTION

Posted By on September 9th, 2017

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to fling open the doors of Germany to more than a million migrants from the developing world baffled many. Although only a minority of these migrants were refugees fleeing persecution, with most of them seeking instead the chance of economic opportunities in Europe, it is widely believed that Mrs Merkel saw the presence of at least a proportion of Syrian refugees amongst their number as an opportunity finally to shake off the spectre of her country’s belligerent past and recast its reputation as a nation governed instead by conscience and compassion.http://www.melaniephillips.com/the-axis-of-destruction/
What she triggered, however, was political and social crisis. The migrants brought with them a disproportionate amount of violence, mainly sexual and directed at German women and girls. The political crisis was perhaps not so much in Germany, where she is ahead in pre-election opinion polling, but more widely in Europe where the combination of the Merkel gesture, the knowledge that many more millions were trying to get to Europe and the EU’s own free movement rule raised the spectre of an unmanageable flood of migrants causing social chaos and destroying European identity itself.
As Robert Curry points out sharply in this article: “In World War II, Germany’s conquest of Europe and subsequent defeat left the continent in ruins. This time, however, Germany’s actions seem designed to bring about Europe’s destruction by inviting conquest rather than by initiating it”.
Curry makes the equally sharp point that, far from being on the same historic page as Britain, France and America in the creation of modern western civilisation, Germany stood against it long before the horrors of Nazism. While Britain, France and America produced the Enlightenment, Germany produced the counter-Enlightenment.
Actually, there were significant differences within the Enlightenment itself in that, while Enlightenment thinking in Britain lay squarely within the context if Biblical morality, the French version was militantly atheistic, creating some of the distorted thinking in the west that passes for modern progressivism today. But most of that distortion can be traced back to German Romanticism that rejected Enlightenment thinking, and which led Germany to become such a problem for the west.
With Germany such a weak link in the chain, the enemies of the west understand very well that mass migration is the way they can destroy it through what might be called demographic colonialism. Turkey’s President Erdogan, who has said in terms that mass migration is the way to conquer the west for Islam, has his thumb on the migration spigot. He is threatening to release it and flood Europe with more Muslim migrants, thus blackmailing the EU to grant Turkey membership – and thus flood Europe with more Muslim migrants.
And now Dr Mordechai Kedar, the Middle East and Islam expert who thinks out of the box, has presented a yet more chilling scenario. He suggests that Iran and Russia plan to destroy western Europe, the US and Canada through a new wave of millions of Syrian Sunnis fleeing the Shi’ite takeover of Syria.
He writes that the millions of Syrian refugees who have fled the civil war will not be able to return once hostilities finally end, for two reasons: first, the place is in ruins, and second, they will be in justified fear of the new rulers of Syria – Shi’ite Iran.
“Iran has been moving Shiites from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan to Syria for a long time in a clear attempt to change the demographic makeup of the country from the Sunni majority it had before the civil war broke out in 2011. The issue could not be more clear because it is no secret that the pre-civil war Sunni majority considered the Alawite rulers heretic idol worshippers who had no right to live in Syria, much less rule over it.

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NORTH KOREA’S ULTIMATUM TO AMERICA :CAROLINE GLICK

Posted By on September 9th, 2017

The nuclear confrontation between the US and North Korea entered a critical phase Sunday with North Korea’s conduct of an underground test of a thermonuclear bomb.

If the previous round of this confrontation earlier this summer revolved around Pyongyang’s threat to attack the US territory of Guam, Sunday’s test, together with North Korea’s recent tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the continental US, was a direct threat to US cities.

In other words, the current confrontation isn’t about US superpower status in Asia, and the credibility of US deterrence or the capabilities of US military forces in the Pacific. The confrontation is now about the US’s ability to protect the lives of its citizens.

The distinction tells us a number of important things. All of them are alarming.

First, because this is about the lives of Americans, rather than allied populations like Japan and South Korea, the US cannot be diffident in its response to North Korea’s provocation. While attenuated during the Obama administration, the US’s position has always been that US military forces alone are responsible for guaranteeing the collective security of the American people.

Pyongyang is now directly threatening that security with hydrogen bombs. So if the Trump administration punts North Korea’s direct threat to attack US population centers with nuclear weapons to the UN Security Council, it will communicate profound weakness to its allies and adversaries alike.

Obviously, this limits the options that the Trump administration has. But it also clarifies the challenge it faces.

The second implication of North Korea’s test of their plutonium-based bomb is that the US’s security guarantees, which form the basis of its global power and its alliance system are on the verge of becoming completely discredited.

In an interview Sunday with Fox News’s Trish Regan, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton was asked about the possible repercussions of a US military assault against North Korea for the security of South Korea.

Regan asked, “What are we risking though if we say we’re going to go in with strategic military strength?… Are we going to end up with so many people’s lives gone in South Korea, in Seoul because we make that move?” Bolton responded with brutal honesty.

“Let me ask you this: how do you feel about dead Americans?” In other words, Bolton said that under prevailing conditions, the US faces the painful choice between imperiling its own citizens and imperiling the citizens of an allied nation. And things will only get worse. Bolton warned that if North Korea’s nuclear threat is left unaddressed, US options will only become more problematic and limited in the years to come.

This then brings us to the third lesson of the current round of confrontation between the US and North Korea.

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Dreamers and Their Dreams by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on September 9th, 2017

Civil rights dreamer Martin Luther King Jr. had a 20th century dream. He dreamed that one day all children would be judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed an American dream that embraced our country’s racial ideals of freedom and equality.

Patriotic dreamer President John F. Kennedy had a 20th century dream. He dreamed that Americans would ask what they could do for their country not what their country could do for them. John F. Kennedy dreamed an American dream that embraced our country’s patriotic ideals of freedom and equality.

JFK was alive to hear King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Both men were assassinated – their dreams shattered by bullets.

President Donald J. Trump has a dream. He dreams that America can fulfill the dreams of MLK and JFK. He dreams that American civilians can be unified like the American military as one cohesive American family regardless of race and make America great again through patriotism.

What unifies the military is patriotism, equality, common cause and an infrastructure of observed rules of conduct. We can become a unified society with a parallel commitment to patriotism, equality, common cause and an infrastructure of observed laws that keep order.

Americans do not bow to power – we enjoy a three-part government structured with checks and balances on executive power. Laws are designed to be changed peacefully through open debate and votes by elected representatives of the people. The current trend of divisiveness and anarchy fomented by Obama’s Leftist “resistance” movement is designed to collapse American democracy and our balanced three-branch system.

What is the purpose of relabeling illegal immigrant children with the romanticized term “Dreamers?” Are the dreams of legal American children less valuable? These are important questions to consider because they define our national priorities. President Trump prioritizes American children and American workers. His America-first promises and policies are designed to preserve and protect American sovereignty, American democracy, and the legitimacy of American territorial borders.

President Trump has a 21st century challenge of reaffirming America’s nationhood and national priorities. The relabeled “Dreamer” movement is an insidious political ploy designed to legitimize illegal immigration in an effort to tip elections toward the Democrat Party. Obama overstepped his constitutional authority with the presidential order that created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA). Deceitfully advertised as humanitarian, DACA prioritizes illegal immigrants over Americans. The “Dreamer” movement is an end-run around our legislative branch that sidesteps existing immigration laws.