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North Korean Crisis Continues to Sizzle While tensions rise, the Iran connection is overlooked. Joseph Klein

Posted By on May 2nd, 2017

North Korea continues to hold the foreign policy crisis spotlight. The rogue regime tested yet another missile on Saturday, which failed like the previous attempted launch. Unbowed, North Korea threatened to carry out a nuclear test “at any time and at any location” its leaders choose to do so. “The DPRK’s measures for bolstering the nuclear force to the maximum will be taken in a consecutive and successive way at any moment and any place decided by its supreme leadership,” a spokesman for the North Korean foreign ministry declared, using the acronym for the regime’s formal name, the Democratic Republic of Korea. When President Trump was asked during his “Face the Nation” interview, which aired on Sunday, how he would react to a sixth nuclear test by North Korea, he replied, “I would not be happy.” In response to a follow-up question whether being unhappy meant “military action,” President Trump, as usual, kept his options open. “I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see,” he said.

The weekend drama followed an open ministerial level meeting of the United Nations Security Council last Friday on the North Korean situation, presided over by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Secretary Tillerson made clear that all options remained on the table, including military action if necessary. However, the bulk of his address was devoted to urging all members of the international community to tighten the economic and diplomatic screws on North Korea in order to increase its isolation.

“For too long, the international community has been reactive in addressing North Korea,” Secretary Tillerson said. “Those days must come to an end. Failing to act now on the most pressing security issue in the world may bring catastrophic consequences.” Talks are out of the question, he added, until North Korea decides to “take concrete steps to reduce the threat that its illegal weapons programs pose to the United States and our allies.” This means not just a nuclear and missile freeze, which is something China has proposed in exchange for a freeze on major military exercises in the region by the United States and South Korea. The Trump administration will be looking for evidence that North Korea is actually beginning “to dismantle its nuclear weapons and missile technology programs.” That is highly unlikely, however, as the regime sees its survival depending on its ability to project a credible nuclear threat against its enemies, particularly the United States.

The Trump administration has tried to distinguish its policy of “urgency” with the failed “strategic patience” approach of the Obama administration. What that means in practical terms is three-fold.

First, tighten enforcement of existing UN sanctions and ramp up the sanctions both at the UN and unilaterally. “We must levy new sanctions on DPRK entities and individuals supporting its weapons and missile programs, and tighten those already in place,” Secretary Tillerson told the Security Council. “The United States also would much prefer countries and people in question own up to their lapses and correct their behavior themselves, but we will not hesitate to sanction third country entities and individuals supporting the DPRK’s illegal activities.”

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Comparing Mideast Refugees with WWII Holocaust Victims What are the similarities? Rabbi Aryeh Spero

Posted By on May 2nd, 2017

President Trump has been under relentless attack from those on the Left against his efforts to limit immigration from terrorist-producing areas and his call for comprehensive vetting and background checks. Beyond doubt, it is the first and most important duty of a President to protect the lives of a country’s citizens, especially where a possibility exists of terrorists being embedded within a particular immigration flow. As the President previously stated, to not strictly enforce our immigration laws is “not compassion but recklessness”.

Some groups are exploiting the Holocaust to promote unrestricted Syrian and other Mideast immigration into this country. However, it is incorrect to draw a parallel between the Jews who fled Europe in the 1930s, who were, as Jews, specific targets for genocide and Nazi concentration camps, and those today wishing to escape the civil war in their Mideast countries. The Syrians, for example, are not being targeted because they are Muslims, and there is no Final Solution planned against them. Their civil wars have placed them in very difficult circumstances, but it is not comparable to the deliberate and planned Final Extermination which was specifically directed at Jews as Jews during the unparalleled Holocaust. It’s a different category altogether.

Furthermore, comparisons to the Holocaust situation are improper, for (2) there were no Nazi agents embedded within the fleeing Jews; (3) the Jews did not harbor a cultural or religious ideology wishing to sow physical destruction on the American people; and (4) there were no rabbis in the 1930s sending forth commands worldwide to destroy the “infidels”. Indeed, (5) the completely innocent Jews of Europe had nowhere to go, no country to take them in — there was not yet a State of Israel—whereas there are 57 Islamic states, many exceedingly wealthy, who could be providing safe haven to their Islamic brothers.

If there is a genocide parallel it involves the Christians of the Middle East who have for decades been targets of the Muslim genocide against them simply for being Christian. And yet, the Left has been silent regarding the plight of Christians. During the Obama years, Christian immigration here from Islamic territories was, based on population percentages, 90% less than what it should have been. Mr. Obama moralized about “not using a religious litmus test” to over-weight Muslim immigration, while severely undercutting and ignoring thousands of Christian refugees begging to be rescued from the Islamic jihad against them.

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Illegal Alien Day The Left used May Day to push its open-borders agenda this year. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on May 2nd, 2017

There were loud, violent, disruptive protests across America yesterday for International Workers’ Day, but American workers’ issues were barely discussed as they took a back seat to the Left’s current mania for illegal aliens and open borders.

This May Day comes after R. Alexander Acosta, 48, was sworn in as the 27th Secretary of Labor by Vice President Mike Pence last week. Acosta, whose nomination was endorsed by the Laborers’ International Union of North America and other unions, was a U.S. Attorney and dean of Florida International University College of Law. He was easily confirmed by the Senate on April 27 by a vote of 60 to 38.

In America, May Day is typically a violent observance. Its purpose is to serve as a rallying point for communists and socialists. Despite that, it hasn’t been that difficult to take the focus off the plight of American workers on May 1 over the years. Perhaps this is because America has never been a left-of-center country perpetually boiling over with class resentment. Americans don’t care much about labor issues or the labor movement because it hasn’t done anything for them.

Like every president since Dwight Eisenhower, President Trump declared May 1 Loyalty Day. In his proclamation, Trump said Loyalty Day is meant “to express our country’s loyalty to individual liberties, to limited government, and to the inherent dignity of every human being.” Last year President Obama used his Loyalty Day proclamation to blather on about “our diversity” and about the importance of delivering a “fairer Nation to the next generation.”

In the late 19th century, the Left hijacked May Day, a perfectly good ancient celebration of spring and fertility in the British Isles and elsewhere. It used to be a day of dancing around the maypole, singing, and eating cake.

May Day was celebrated in early America but today it is largely forgotten in this country. And so it was easy for the Left to fill this cultural vacuum and co-opt May Day for its own anti-American purposes.

And with Democrats and the rest of the Left in disarray after Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat in November, radical immigration activists were seemingly able to wrest May Day away from organized labor this year.

This year’s May Day observances ranged from indifferent to conspicuously hostile to American workers as organizers used May 1 to largely ignore the plight of native workers pushed out of their jobs by cheaper illegal alien labor. The so-called rights of illegal alien workers took center stage yesterday.

On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Carlson mocked leftist campaigners for sounding like agents of the pro-open borders, pro-immigration amnesty U.S. Chamber of Commerce and for refusing to condemn illegal alien workers for driving wages down and leaving legally present workers unemployed or underemployed.

Steven Choi, executive director of the George Soros-funded New York Immigration Coalition, wasted a valuable prime time spot on Carlson’s Fox News Channel show ducking questions about how immigrants put downward pressure on wages.

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Germany: Migrant Crime Spiked in 2016 by Soeren Kern

Posted By on May 2nd, 2017

Although non-Germans make up approximately 10% of the overall German population, they accounted for 30.5% of all crime suspects in the country in 2016.

Nearly 250,000 migrants entered the country illegally in 2016, up 61.4% from 154,188 in 2015. More than 225,000 migrants were found living in the country illegally (Unerlaubter Aufenthalt) in 2016.

The Berlin Senate launched an inquiry into why migrants disproportionally appear as criminals in the city-state compared to Germans.

An official annual report about crime in Germany has revealed a rapidly deteriorating security situation in the country marked by a dramatic increase in violent crime, including murder, rape and sexual assault.

The report also shows a direct link between the growing lawlessness in Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow in more than one million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The report — Police Crime Statistics 2016 (Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik, PKS) — was compiled by the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) and presented by Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière in Berlin on April 24.

The number of non-German crime suspects (nichtdeutsche Tatverdächtige) legally residing in Germany jumped to 616,230 in 2016, up from 555,820 in 2015 — an increase of 11% — according to the report. Although non-Germans make up approximately 10% of the overall German population, they accounted for 30.5% of all crime suspects in the country in 2016, up from 27.6% in 2015.

In this year’s report, the BKA created a separate subcategory called “migrants” (Zuwanderer) which encompasses a combination of refugees, pending asylum seekers, failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.

According to the BKA, the number of migrant crime suspects (tatverdächtiger Zuwanderer) in Germany in 2016 jumped to 174,438 from 114,238 in 2015 — up 52.7%. Although “migrants” made up less than 2% of the German population in 2016, they accounted for 8.6% of all crime suspects in the country — up from 5.7% in 2015.

In terms of non-German crime suspects residing legally in Germany, Turks were the primary offenders in 2016, with 69,918 suspects, followed by Romanians, Poles, Syrians, Serbs, Italians, Afghans, Bulgarians, Iraqis, Albanians, Kosovars, Moroccans, Iranians and Algerians.

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Germany Hit by Merkel’s Imported Crime Wave by Vijeta Uniyal

Posted By on May 2nd, 2017

According to the Germany’s annual crime report, compiled by the Federal Crime Bureau (BKA), there has been a more than 50% rise in migrant crime in the country compared to the year before.

They not only indulge in petty crime but have come to dominate serious and violent crime in Germany.

European mainstream media may keep on putting a positive spin on Merkel’s “courageous” and “selfless” stance, but her policy continues to incur heavy economic, social and human cost, not only on Germany, but on the cultural future of European civilisation.

At the height of the European migrant crisis in early 2016, when masses of migrants were pouring into Europe, the German Green Party Chairwoman Katrin Göring-Eckardt could not control her joy. “We have just received an unexpected gift in the form of people,” she told her fellow Germans, reminding them to be grateful. This gift, she said, was going to make the country “more religious, more colourful, more diverse and younger.” It was gift, it turns out, that keeps on giving.

According to the country’s annual crime report, compiled by the Federal Crime Bureau (BKA), there has been a more than 50% rise in migrant crime in the country compared to the year before.

The German newspaper Die Welt, which received an advance copy of the annual crime report, wrote:

“The number of immigrants suspected of criminal acts in 2016 has risen by 52.7 percent, to the figure of 174,438, compared to the previous year. To ensure a fair comparison with the rest of the population, crimes that only immigrants can commit, such as illegal entry to the country, have been taken out from the statistics. The annual police report (PKS) shows that there were total of 616,230 crime suspects of foreign origin last year. The migrant share [of total crime figures] was disproportionately large, namely 174,438 — more than a quarter.”

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Do Not Be Fooled by These “Moderates” in Florida by Joe Kaufman

Posted By on May 2nd, 2017

Since its creation, the Deobandi movement has produced a number of militant offshoots, most notably the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and spread its tentacles around the world, including in the United States. Shafayat Mohamed returned from India and set up one such tentacle in Florida.

As Thomas Friedman wrote, “We talked to the boys. All of them thought America was evil and that Osama bin Laden was a hero.”

Much like its sister madrasa in Pakistan, the Darul Uloom Institute and its imam, Shafayat Mohamed, follow in the line of the most extreme elements of the Deobandi movement. The only difference is that one is more than 7,000 miles away from American shores, and the other is right in our backyard.

The Darul Uloom Institute — who? — in Pembroke Pines, Florida will hold its annual fundraising dinner and awards ceremony on May 6. If it is anything like last year’s gala, which saw honors go to a prominent local politician, a rabbi, and a pastor, you will hear some “moderate” messaging.

Do not, however, let this radical Islamic center’s attempt to ingratiate itself into mainstream American society fool you. Its history is mired in violence and hate.

The Darul Uloom Institute was founded by its imam, Shafayat Mohamed, in October 1994. Originally from Trinidad, Mohamed left for India in 1975, where he was educated at Darul Uloom Deoband, the school where the hardline Sunni Deobandi movement was established in May 1866. In a show of favor to his student, Darul Uloom Deoband selected Mohamed to lead a group of Americans in a 1979 tour of its facilities.

Since its creation, the Deobandi movement has produced a number of militant offshoots, most notably the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and spread its tentacles around the world, including in the United States. Mohamed returned from India and set up one such tentacle in Florida.

Shortly after its founding, Mohamed’s institute became affiliated with “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla, a soon-to-be al-Qaeda operative who plotted to set off a radiological bomb in the U.S. Padilla, then a recent convert to Islam, was a student of Mohamed’s and attended the institute from 1995 through 1997. The following year, Padilla abandoned his wife and home in Florida for Egypt and then Pakistan, on his way to becoming a full-blown terrorist.

Mohamed has his own radical history. He has been thrown off a number of Broward County boards due to his extreme rhetoric against homosexuals. In February 2005, he published an article, “Tsunami: Wrath of God,” on the Darul Uloom website; he claims in it that homosexuality caused the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. Mohamed’s article does not target just gays. It also describes Jews and Christians — whom he calls “People of the Book” — as “perverted transgressors.”

The profile picture on Mohamed’s Facebook page shows him shaking hands with now-deceased Muslim leader Ahmed Deedat, with whom he said he “had a good relationship.” The photo with Deedat was taken in Durban, South Africa, at what was then named the Bin Laden Centre. Deedat, who according to the New York Times was “a vocal anti-Semite and ardent backer of Osama bin Laden,” personally received millions of dollars from Bin Laden and Bin Laden’s family for the center.

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On Obamacare, Republicans Vastly Over-Promised Now that Republicans actually have power, they are falling short. By Rich Lowry

Posted By on May 2nd, 2017

Republicans have put on a clinic on over-promising during the past several years.

Even if you were paying only very little attention, you would have gotten the distinct impression over the past four election cycles that the GOP was unalterably committed to repealing and replacing Obamacare.

It didn’t matter what year the Republicans were running (2010, 2012, 2014, or 2016) or what presidential candidate (earnest, establishment-friendly Mitt Romney or bombastic outsider Donald Trump), repeal of Obamacare remained the consistent theme.

The party didn’t leave anything in doubt. It didn’t rely on weasel words or escape hatches. Republicans pledged to, as Texas senator Ted Cruz put it, repeal “every blasted word of Obamacare.” And not in phases, not slowly over time, but ASAP.

Exaggerating only a little more than other Republicans, Donald Trump said last year that “we will be able to immediately repeal and replace Obamacare. Have to do it. I will ask Congress to convene a special session so we can repeal and replace, and it will be such an honor for me, for you, and for everybody in this country because Obamacare has to be replaced and we will do it very, very quickly.”

With the House on the verge perhaps of getting a repeal-and-replace bill through, it is worth recalling the years of sweeping promises. The House bill will roll back Obamacare taxes and introduce a significant reform of Medicaid, but when it comes to the heart of Obamacare — the regulations — the bill only makes it possible for states to get waivers, based on certain conditions.

This is a bill probably worth having, even if it would have earned the derision of Republicans back in the days when they were winning elections with Churchillian statements of resolve on Obamacare. Then, it would have been considered a contemptible half a loaf — at best. Now, when Republicans actually have power, everything looks different.

First, there are the cold feet. As soon as Republicans were confronted with the possibility of writing law rather than making symbolic gestures, they lost much of their enthusiasm for the repeal-only bill they had sent to President Barack Obama’s desk for a ritual veto in January 2016. (Republican support for that bill at the time was near-unanimous, 239–3 in the House and 52–2 in the Senate).

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Bret Stephens Gives Climate-Change Alarmists Advice, and the Left Erupts His first column for the New York Times elicits shrieks of ‘Denier!’ and ‘Shut up!’ By Kyle Smith

Posted By on May 2nd, 2017

Ordinarily when war breaks out between the activist Left and the New York Times, the conservative impulse is not to delve too deeply into the substance of the dispute but rather to inquire about the availability of refreshments: When the Ayatollah and Saddam go to war, what is there to do but put one’s feet up and enjoy the carnage?

I invoke Islamism advisedly. After Bret Stephens, the Times’ new conservative op-ed columnist, made the mild-mannered and more or less inarguable point that there are details unsettled within the topic of climate change, his many ideological opponents reacted with a mindless fury characteristic of religious zealotry. Someone tweeted at Stephens that he should share the fate of Daniel Pearl, like Stephens a longtime Wall Street Journal writer, who was denounced for being Jewish and beheaded by men acting in Allah’s name. The web of ties between ordinary global-minded progressives and jihadists grows ever more dense: For both groups, American conservatives pose the principal threat to their goals.

Let’s give credit, though, to the Times’ op-ed editor James Bennet, both for hiring Stephens in the first place — the Times now boasts three right-of-center op-ed columnists, which is more than tokenism — and for standing by his new hire while abuse rained down and some progressives claimed to have canceled their subscriptions. Non-partisan institutions (are you listening, university presidents?) and even the Right should learn this lesson from Bennet’s bracing example: Ignore hecklers. They enjoy veto power only if a cowardly decision-maker grants them that power. After a few days, Stephens’s attackers will move on and find something else to be outraged about.

Stephens’s column arrives at a moment when, culturally speaking, the fulminating Left is feeling pretty upbeat. Its core stratagem of demanding that conservatives either shut up or be shut down is working frighteningly well. Universities from coast to coast are either allowing leftist groups to cancel conservative speech before it occurs or providing such weak and ambivalent protections for speakers that right-wing ideas are effectively squelched. Using Bill O’Reilly’s alleged sexual misconduct as a pretext, Media Matters managed to get him booted off the air. If Bill Clinton had a political talk show, I think we all know the answer to whether leftist pressure groups would publicly denounce any advertisers that sponsored it.

Stephens’s perfectly reasonable column amounted to friendly strategic advice for the climate alarmists: “Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” he noted, and he was immediately treated as a deplorable imbecile. Think Progress compared him to a Holocaust denier and a KKK official. Nate Silver, whose reputation for being a dispassionate data nerd increasingly seems endangered, denounced the column with a barnyard epithet and posted a tweet in which a Times billboard advertising “Truth” was (sarcastically) juxtaposed with a quotation of Stephens’s unassailable point that “claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science.” “Classic climate change denialism,” thundered Slate. “Climate denial wouldn’t get past my desk,” a New Yorker fact-checker tweeted, as if Stephens denied there is a climate. (Stephens also said human influence on global warming was “indisputable.”) The Guardian, as ever the most grievously wounded of them all, called Stephens a “hippie puncher.”

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You Gotta Lie Oh! What a tangled progressive web we weave . . . By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 2nd, 2017

Red/blue, conservative/liberal, and Republican/Democrat mark traditional American divides. But one fault line is not so 50/50 — that of the contemporary hard progressive movement versus traditional politics, values, and customs.

The entire menu of race, class, and gender identity politics, lead-from-behind foreign policy, political correctness, and radical environmentalism so far have not won over most Americans.

Proof of that fact are the serial reliance of their supporters on deception, and the erosion of language on campus and in politics and the media. The progressive movement requires both deceit and euphemism to mask its apparently unpopular agenda.

What the Benghazi scandal, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, and the Iran Deal all had in common was their reliance on ruse. If the White House and its allies had told the whole truth about all these incidents, Americans probably would have widely rejected the ideological premises that framed them.

In the case of Benghazi, most Americans would not fault an obscure video for causing scripted rioting and death at an American consulate and CIA annex. They would hardly believe that a policy of maintaining deliberately thin security at U.S. facilities would encourage reciprocal local good will in the Middle East. They would not agree that holding back American rescue forces was a wise move likely to forestall an international confrontation or escalation.

In other words, Americans wanted their consulate in Benghazi well fortified and protected from seasoned terrorists, and they favored rapid deployment of maximum relief forces in times of crises — but, unfortunately, these were not the agendas of the Obama administration. So, to disguise that unpleasant reality, Americans were treated to Susan Rice’s yarns about a spontaneous, unexpected riot that was prompted by a right-wing video, and endangered Americans far beyond the reach of U.S. military help.

Ditto the Bowe Bergdahl caper, the American deserter on the Afghan front. Aside from the useful publicity of “bringing home” an American hostage, there was an implicit progressive subtext to both his earlier flight and eventual return: Young introspective soldiers are often troubled about their nation’s ambiguous role in the Middle East and so, understandably, sometimes err in their search for meaning. When they do, and when they perhaps “wander off,” the government has win-win resources to address their temporary lapse — in this case, killing two birds with one stone by downsizing the apparently repulsive Guantanamo Bay detention facility and returning punished-enough Taliban combatants to their families.

What Susan Rice (ostensibly the go-to consigliere in such deals) could not say is that the Obama administration released five dangerous terrorists in order to bring home one likely deserter, whose selfish AWOL behavior may have contributed over the years to the injury or even deaths of several American soldiers tasked with finding him. Instead, we got the lie that Bergdahl was a brave solider who served with honor and distinction and was captured in mediis rebus on the battlefield, with the implication that his personal odyssey inadvertently led to the bonus of returning in-limbo foreign detainees and reducing the population of an embarrassing gulag.

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Would an intelligent person pay a penny more for ‘organic’ food? By Ed Straker

Posted By on May 2nd, 2017

The WaPo, of all places, had a great investigative piece about the continuing sham of “organic” foods, this time focusing on dairy products.

Organic dairies are required to allow the cows to graze daily throughout the growing season — that is, the cows are supposed to be grass-fed, not confined to barns and feedlots. This method is considered more natural and alters the constituents of the cows’ milk in ways consumers deem beneficial.

But during visits by The Washington Post to Aurora’s High Plains complex across eight days last year, signs of grazing were sparse, at best. Aurora said its animals were out on pasture day and night, but during most Post visits the number of cows seen on pasture numbered only in the hundreds. At no point was any more than 10 percent of the herd out. A high-resolution satellite photo taken in mid-July by Digital Globe, a space imagery vendor, shows a typical situation — only a few hundred on pasture.

In response, Aurora spokeswoman Sonja Tuitele dismissed the Post visits as anomalies and “drive-bys.”

“The requirements of the USDA National Organic Program allow for an extremely wide range of grazing practices that comply with the rule,” Tuitele said by email.

The milk from Aurora also indicates that its cows may not graze as required by organic rules. Testing conducted for The Post by Virginia Tech scientists shows that on a key indicator of grass-feeding, the Aurora milk matched conventional milk, not organic.

Tuitele dismissed the tests as “isolated.”

In the case of milk, consumers pay extra — often double — when the carton says “USDA Organic,” in the belief they are getting something different. Organic dairy sales amounted to $6 billion last year in the United States.

Under organic rules, the USDA typically does not inspect farms. Instead, farmers hire their own inspectors from lists of private companies and other organizations licensed by the USDA. An inspector makes an annual visit, arranged days or weeks in advance. Only 5 percent of inspections are expected to be done unannounced.