France’s Fatal Attraction to Islam by Giulio Meotti

Instead of fighting to save what is savable, French opinion-makers are already writing the terms of surrender.

By hybridizing cultures and rejecting Christianity, France will soon end up not even teaching also Arabic, but only Arabic, and marking Ramadan instead of Easter.

Instead of wasting their time trying to organize an “Islam of France”, French political leaders, opinion makers and think tanks should look for ways to counter the creeping Islamization of their country. Otherwise, we may soon be seeing not only a “Grand Imam de France”, but also lashes and stonings on the Champs Élysées.

Two years ago, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, suggested converting empty churches into mosques, to accommodate the growing Muslim community in abandoned Christian sites. Now, many people in France seem to have taken the idea so seriously that a report released by the foundation Terra Nova, France’s main think tank that provides ideas to the governing Socialist Party, suggests that in order to integrate Muslims better, French authorities should replace the two Catholic holidays — Easter Monday and Pentecost — with Islamic holidays. To be ecumenical, they also included a Jewish holiday.

Written by Alain Christnacht and Marc-Olivier Padis, the study, “The Emancipation of Islam of France,” states: “In order to treat all the denominations equally, it should include two important new holidays, Yom Kippur and Eid el Kebir, with the removal of two Mondays that do not correspond to particular solemnity”.

Thus, Easter and Pentecost can be sacrificed to keep the ever-elusive multicultural “peace”.

Terra Nova’s proposal was rejected by the Episcopal Conference of France, but endorsed by the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, close to the Muslim Brotherhood, which would also like to include the Islamic holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha in the calendar. The idea of replacing the Christian holidays was also sponsored by the Observatory of Secularism, an organ created by President François Hollande to coordinate secularist policies. The Observatory of Secularism also proposed eliminating some Christian holidays to make way for the Islamic, Jewish and secular holidays. “France must replace two Christian holidays to make way for the Yom Kippur and Eid,” said Dounia Bouzar, a member of the Observatory.

The Mob at Middlebury A mob tries to silence Charles Murray and sends a prof to the ER.

Once again a scholar invited to speak at a university has been shouted down by an angry mob clearly unable to challenge him intellectually. On Thursday at Middlebury College, allegedly an institution of higher learning, a crowd of protesters tried to run Charles Murray off campus. Mr. Murray is the author of many influential books, including “Coming Apart,” which the kids might read if they want to understand their country and can cope without trigger warnings.

Amid the shouts, Mr. Murray was taken to another location where he was able to speak. But a Middlebury professor escorting Mr. Murray from campus—Allison Stanger—was later sent to the hospital after being assaulted by protesters who also attacked the car they were in. As if to underscore the madness, the headline over the initial Associated Press dispatch smeared Mr. Murray rather than focusing on the intolerance of those disrupting him: “College students protest speaker branded white nationalist.”

Middlebury President Laurie Patton apologized in a statement to those “who came in good faith to participate in a serious discussion, and particularly to Mr. Murray and Prof. Stanger for the way they were treated.” While she believes some protesters were “outside agitators,” Middlebury students were also involved—and she said she would be “responding.”

Mr. Murray tweeted: “Report from the front: The Middlebury administration was exemplary. The students were seriously scary.” Let’s hope President Patton follows through with discipline to scare these students straight.

Trump’s Defense Buildup The only military we can’t afford is one that is too small.

It’s conventional wisdom that Donald Trump is a very different sort of Republican than Ronald Reagan, but in his speech to Congress Tuesday the 45th President made clear that he intends to walk in the 40th President’s footsteps in one crucial respect. That’s his call for a dramatic increase in defense spending—as necessary today as it was when the Gipper took office 36 years ago.

This year’s Pentagon budget is $619 billion, of which $68 billion is for “overseas contingencies” in Iraq and elsewhere. That sounds like a big number—until you consider the broader trends, budgetary and strategic. Defense spending reached a post-9/11 peak of $757 billion in 2010, but then began to come down sharply as part of Barack Obama’s imaginary peace dividend following his withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

The first big chop, in 2011, involved a 10-year, $487 billion cut that capped successful weapons programs such as the F-22 fighter on the short-sighted assumption that American pilots were unlikely to get into dogfights with their Russian or Chinese counterparts. Such acquisitions cuts are doubly wasteful, since they squander the fruits of billions in research and development costs while postponing the replacement of legacy aircraft that become increasingly expensive to fly and maintain.

Then came budget sequestration in 2013, which led to an additional $37 billion cut that year alone. The cuts hit operations and maintenance especially hard, with a 30% reduction in day-to-day operating funds so the military could maintain spending on wartime operations. The Pentagon continued to labor under dwindling budgets until last year, when it bottomed out at $596 billion, even as U.S. forces still fight in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The result is a military that is heading toward the demoralized and underequipped “hollow force” of the late 1970s. Some 62% of the Navy’s mainstay F-18 fighters—and 74% of the Marines’—are grounded for lack of parts or maintenance or otherwise deemed unfit for combat.

A Theatrical Rebuttal to the Farce of ‘Dignicide’ The creator of ‘Assisted Suicide: The Musical’ says euthanasia denies the value of people who have illnesses or disabilities. By Sohrab Ahmari

London

I’m choosing choice
So are my girls and boys
Choice is king, there’s no denyin’
Cut my choice, and I’ll start cryin’

So runs one of the many catchy tunes in “Assisted Suicide: The Musical.” The title and subject are dark, but British theatergoers don’t seem to care. “Assisted Suicide” has received rave reviews since it was first shown last year, and when I saw it in January a packed house gave it a standing ovation. That’s all the more remarkable given the musical’s anti-euthanasia message, at a time when voters on both sides of the Atlantic are making their peace with the practice.

“We’ve become used to clapping along and thinking that choice is good,” the musical’s creator, Liz Carr, tells me in a recent interview at the Southbank arts center in London. “It’s like a mantra: the right to die, the right to die, the right to die. We just clap along, and we don’t know what assisted suicide means or what the consequences are—that we’re essentially asking the state to be involved in people’s death.”

Euthanasia will likely be on the legislative agenda in Australia, Finland, Portugal and Sweden this year. In jurisdictions where medically assisted suicide is already permitted—Belgium, Canada, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland and six U.S. states among them—the definition of who qualifies keeps expanding.

Holland and Belgium have the world’s most permissive laws. In November, a doctor in the Netherlands euthanized a 41-year-old father of two who had struggled with alcoholism; the Dutch government is considering a draft law to legalize euthanasia for perfectly healthy people who hold “a well-considered opinion that their life is complete.” Belgium in 2014 removed the minimum age for euthanasia, and in September a terminally ill 17-year-old became the first minor to take advantage of the change. Both countries routinely euthanize patients with dementia and depression.
The stakes are especially high for people with disabilities, like Ms. Carr, who suffers from a genetic disorder that prevents her from extending her muscles, among other impairments. Such people watch the assisted-suicide movement’s recent strides and wonder what it all means for their future in societies where the government is the main, often the sole, health-care provider.

Yet a steady stream of uncritical coverage in the media continues to push the euthanasia movement along. Such coverage usually takes the form of TV documentaries that follow, and gently cheer, a disabled or terminally ill patient’s journey to the death chamber. Thanks but no thanks, says Ms. Carr.

“I was really, really angry at the media portrayal of this subject matter and the amount of bias and the amount of propaganda,” she says. Watching the documentaries, “I’d say, ‘But it’s not that simple! Why is nobody looking for alternatives or talking to other people?’ ”

So she created a musical. Much of “Assisted Suicide” involves Ms. Carr taking on her alter ego, a character named Documentary Liz. Film footage shows Documentary Liz living a humdrum disabled life, while a lachrymose melody plays and a narrator dourly describes the scene: “Liz feels trapped, imprisoned by her difficult circumstances. Liz has few freedoms, few choices on a day-to-day basis.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Iran Is Progressing Towards Nuclear Weapons Via North Korea By Lt. Col. (Ret.) Dr. Refael Ofek and Lt. Col. (Res.) Dr. Dany Shoham

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This analysis argues that Iran is steadily making progress towards a nuclear weapon and is doing so via North Korea. Iran is unwilling to submit to a years-long freeze of its military nuclear program as stipulated by the July 2015 Vienna Nuclear Deal. North Korea is ready and able to provide a clandestine means of circumventing the deal, which would allow the Iranians to covertly advance that nuclear program. At the same time, Iran is likely assisting in the upgrading of certain North Korean strategic capacities.https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/iran-progressing-nuclear-weapons-via-north-korea/

While the Vienna Nuclear Deal (VND) is focused on preventing (or at least postponing) the development of nuclear weapons (NW) in Iran, its restrictions are looser with regard to related delivery systems (particularly nuclear-capable ballistic missiles) as well as to the transfer of nuclear technology by Iran to other countries. Moreover, almost no limits have been placed on the enhancement of Tehran’s military nuclear program outside Iran. North Korea (NK) arguably constitutes the ideal such location for Iran.

The nuclear and ballistic interfaces between the two countries are long-lasting, unique, and intriguing. The principal difference between the countries is that while NK probably already possesses NW, Iran aspires to acquire them but is subject to the VND. Iran has the ability, however, to contribute significantly to NK’s nuclear program, in terms of both technology (i.e., by upgrading gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment) and finance (and there is an irony in this, as it is thanks to its VND-spurred economic recovery that Iran is able to afford it).

This kind of strategic, military-technological collaboration is more than merely plausible. It is entirely possible, indeed likely, that such a collaboration is already underway.

This presumption assumes that Iran is unwilling to lose years to the freeze on its military nuclear program. It further assumes that NK is ready and able to furnish a route by which Iran can clandestinely circumvent the VND, thus allowing it to make concrete progress on its NW program. And finally, it assumes that the ongoing, rather vague interface between the two countries reflects Iranian advances towards NW. The following components and vectors comprise that interface.

From the 1990s onward, dozens – perhaps hundreds – of NK scientists and technicians apparently worked in Iran in nuclear and ballistic facilities. Ballistic missile field tests were held in Iran, for instance near Qom, where the NK missiles Hwasong-6 (originally the Soviet Scud-C, which is designated in Iran as Shehab-2) and Nodong-1 (designated in Iran as Shehab-3) were tested. Moreover, in the mid-2000s, the Shehab-3 was tentatively adjusted by Kamran Daneshjoo, a top Iranian scientist, to carry a nuclear warhead.

Furthermore, calculations were made that were aimed at miniaturizing a nuclear implosion device in order to fit its dimensions and weight to the specifications of the Shehab-3 re-entry vehicle. These, together with benchmark tests, were conducted in the highly classified facility of Parchin. Even more significantly, Iranian experts were present at Punggye-ri, the NK nuclear test site, when such tests were carried out in the 2000s.

Syria served concurrently as another important platform for Iran – until the destruction by Israel of the plutonium-based nuclear reactor that had been constructed in Syria by NK. According to some reports, not only were the Iranians fully aware of that project in real time, but the project was heavily financed by Tehran. Considering Iranian interests, it was probably intended as a backup for the heavy water plutonium production reactor of Iran’s military nuclear program, and possibly as an alternative to the Iranian uranium enrichment plant in Natanz in the event that it is dismantled.

Donald Trump’s Boffo Speech to Congress Politically and theatrically brilliant. Bruce Thornton

Move over, Howard Stern. Donald Trump is the new “king of all media.” His address to Congress was politically and theatrically brilliant, confounding his media critics–– even the virulently Trumpophobic ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and the other usual suspects gave it positive reviews––and exposing the sore-loser Democrats for the partisan hacks they are. You knew the Dems were in a panic when they scurried from the hall at the end of the speech so they could start spinning the journalists waiting outside.

We are witnessing a profound shift in presidential politics, but whether it will lead to significant reform of our soft-despotic state remains an open question.

After a campaign and first month in office filled with caustic tweets, petty squabbles, heated rhetoric, and seeming disarray, Trump spoke in the disciplined, lofty, aspirational, conciliatory tone we expect of presidents. But the Democrats mostly sat on their hands, even when Trump promised to create jobs and help curb the slaughter in blighted black neighborhoods, boons for the Democrats’ constituents. They did rouse themselves when, like Nero in the Colosseum, they gave the thumbs-down to Trump’s proposals to repeal and replace Obamacare, or destroy ISIS, or actually enforce federal immigration laws. Given how much Americans dislike the failing health-care entitlement behemoth, fear metastasizing jihadist terror outfits, and want illegal alien criminals deported and our borders secured, it was bad optics for Dems to churlishly remain seated, their scowls and silence implying to viewers that they value illegal alien murderers, an imploding Obamacare, and avoiding “Islamophobia” over the security and interests of American citizens.

The highlight, of course, came when Trump acknowledged the widow of slain Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens, killed during a raid in Yemen. Questions about the raid have been raised by Owens’ father and the Dems, giving the hostile media another pretext for attacking Trump. But all the debate about the value or success of the raid has been eclipsed by the minute-and-a-half standing ovation given to Owens’ widow, who wept as she occasionally lifted her gaze upward and silently spoke to her lost husband. Critics are carping about “exploitation” and “political theater,” something they didn’t mind when Hillary exploited a grieving “Gold Star” couple at the Democrat convention. But their complaints won’t reach a fraction of the millions who witnessed that powerfully moving moment.

Law and Order, Under New Management President Trump and Attorney General Sessions offer hope for a turnaround in public safety. Heather Mac Donald

Reprinted from City-Journal.org.

President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired a double-shot of reality yesterday at the Black Lives Matter narrative about policing. Trump laid down broad markers for a change in law enforcement policy and tone from the White House during an address to a joint session of Congress. Sessions fleshed out more crime-policy details earlier that day in a speech to the National Association of Attorneys General. Together, both speeches provide hope for a significant turnaround in the nation’s rising violent-crime rate.

Trump’s promise to restore law and order was a centerpiece of his campaign. That theme drove the mainstream media and liberal politicians to a state of near apoplexy. Every time Trump brought attention to the increasing loss of black life in the Black Lives Matter era, the media responded that there was nothing to be concerned about, because crime rates were still below their early 1990s levels. President Barack Obama dismissed the rising inner-city carnage as a mere “blip” in a few cities. That “blip” in 2015, however, was the largest single-year increase in homicide—11 percent—in nearly half a century, as Trump pointed out last night. The victims were overwhelmingly black. Over 900 more black males were killed in 2015 compared with 2014. And the increase in street crime has not abated. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that murders in the 30 largest U.S. cities were 14 percent higher in 2016 compared with 2015, a stunning increase coming on top of 2015’s already-massive homicide rise. While it is true that a two-decade-long violent-crime decline has not been wiped out in two years, if current trends continue, we could find ourselves back to the city-destroying anarchy of the early 1990s soon enough.

Last night, Trump refused to back down on his central civil rights concern: that “every American child should be able to grow up in a safe community.” The media have—astonishingly—called him a racist and Hitler for making that assertion. On the left, it is only acceptable to speak about the loss of a black life if a police officer is responsible. But police shootings, overwhelmingly triggered by violently resisting suspects, cause a minute fraction of black homicide deaths. It is criminals, not the police, who are responsible for the tragic fact that blacks die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Nevertheless, the false narrative that we are living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings has led officers in high-crime areas to disengage from discretionary proactive policing, with the result being greatly emboldened criminals.

Trump last night set out to change that narrative. To ensure that inner-city children enjoy the same safety that other Americans take for granted, “we must work with—not against—the men and women of law enforcement,” Trump said. He continued:

We must build bridges of cooperation and trust—not drive the wedge of disunity and division.

The Lessons Of The Hamas War Israel’s strategic mistake. Caroline Glick

The State Comptroller’s Report on Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s war with Hamas in the summer of 2014, is exceedingly detailed. The problem is that it addresses the wrong details.

Israel’s problem with Hamas wasn’t its tactics for destroying Hamas’s attack tunnels. Israel faced two challenges in its war with Hamas that summer. The first had to do with the regional and global context of the war. The second had to do with its understanding of its enemy on the ground.

War between Hamas and Israel took place as the Sunni Arab world was steeped a two-pronged existential struggle. On the one hand, Sunni regimes fought jihadist groups that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood movement. On the other, they fought against Iran and its proxies in a bid to block Iran’s moves toward regional hegemony.

On both fronts, the Sunni regimes, led by Egypt under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Saudi regime and the United Arab Emirates, were shocked to discover that the Obama administration was siding with their enemies against them.

If Israel went into the war against Hamas thinking that the Obama administration would treat it differently than it treated the Sunni regimes, it quickly discovered that it was mistaken. From the outset of the battle between Hamas and Israel, the Obama administration supported Hamas against Israel.

America’s support for Hamas was expressed at the earliest stages of the war when then-secretary of state John Kerry demanded that Israel accept an immediate cease-fire based entirely on Hamas’s terms. This demand, in various forms, remained the administration’s position throughout the 50-day war.

Hamas’s terms were impossible for Israel. They included opening the jihadist regime’s land borders with Israel and Egypt, and providing it with open access to the sea. Hamas demanded to be reconnected to the international banking system in order to enable funds to enter Gaza freely from any spot on the globe. Hamas also demanded that Israel release its terrorists from its prisons.

President Trump Saves a CIA Agent The truth about the CIA and the covert war at home and abroad. Daniel Greenfield

Last month, President Trump stood in front of the CIA Memorial Wall and declared that Islamic terrorism “has to be eradicated just off the face of the Earth.” It is front of this wall where, as Vice President Pence said, “we remember 117 who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom”, that real change in how we treat those who fight terrorism must begin.

The vast majority of the men and women added to that wall in the last few decades were killed by Islamic terrorists. They include Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods who were murdered in Benghazi. And who were abandoned by their government, by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, before their deaths.

The media made much of the resignation of Edward Price. Price had started out as an analyst under Bush. Under Obama, he shot up to spokesman, senior director and special assistant to the president. In this capacity, he insisted that the CIA should research Global Warming and sold the Iran nuke sellout.

Price’s resignation was meaningless. He was an Obama loyalist embedded in a senior national security position to push propaganda. And now there was no future under Trump for his old line of work.

But the media wept crocodile tears for the “career CIA official” whose work involved endangering national security and manipulating the media. It has shown distinctly less interest in the plight of a CIA agent who actually took risks on the ground to secure the capture of Islamic terrorists.

While the media portrays the White House as being at war with the CIA, the Trump administration prevented the extradition and imprisonment of Sabrina De Sousa. De Sousa was in the airport about to be extradited to Italy, but an agreement was reached to release her instead.

“I can confirm that this wouldn’t have happened without extraordinary help from the Trump administration,” Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra said.

De Sousa had been working a secretary in the United States Embassy in Rome. She is allegedly one of a number of CIA people accused by Italy of having helped capture a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s murderous organization, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya or the Islamic Group, led by the Blind Sheikh who was involved in the World Trade Center bombing and plots to bomb landmarks across New York City.

Considering the leftist slant and general incompetence of Italy’s legal system, it is not clear if Sabrina De Sousa was even involved in the operation. Furthermore the United States government’s position is that De Sousa’s job at our embassy made her arrest a violation of international agreements. Italy convicted 26 Americans in absentia. These convictions are worthless here, but Sabrina De Sousa found herself under arrest while flying to visit her sick mother.

The Democrats and the media, who of late have strived to portray themselves as the defenders of the intelligence community, have no interest in the case. If anything they are covertly cheering it on.

Ever since 9/11, they declared war on the CIA personnel who were capturing and interrogating the terrorists. They have targeted them and exposed them to aid the Islamic terrorists at war with us. The left bemoans the Obama loyalists elevated to top national security posts while writing off the lives of the men and women on the ground. That is what happened in Benghazi and across the War on Terror.

The Democrats have recently learned to love the CIA, as they attempt to exploit anti-American leftists planted in the Agency in their war against the democratically elected President of the United States.

But their sudden respect for the CIA is a very recent one.

Early in Obama’s term in office, Democrats tried to threaten CIA interrogators with 15 years in prison if they interrogated Muslim terrorists too harshly. A year earlier, Attorney General Eric Holder had named a prosecutor to investigate the CIA’s interrogation of Islamic terrorists. The investigation, with its efforts to bring criminal charges, dragged on through much of Obama’s first term, without yielding anything.

But the Democrats were still determined to punish the men and women who had kept us safe. The release of the partisan Senate report two years later, not only endangered American lives and smeared the CIA wholesale, but allowed the families of terrorists to target assorted personnel, including the psychologists who had worked with the CIA on the interrogation program, for lawfare campaigns.

Obama’s own CIA director had charged Democrat Senate committee members with stealing sensitive documents. The names of these psychologists had been leaked through a Senate report which had used the names and pseudonyms of CIA officials. Even the pseudonyms could be used to identify CIA people.

Among their top targets was the CIA official who was the inspiration for Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya whose real life counterpart headed the Global Jihad Unit. Despite every effort by the CIA, the media insisted on publishing her name. Taking the lead in this illegal act was the Washington Post. “Maya’s” name still appears on the website a top Senator Democrat who had called for a special investigation into the Valerie Plame affair. Indeed the media had recreated a real life version of the Plame affair except this time, unlike Plame, their target was actually hunting Islamic terrorists in trouble spots.

And, equally predictably, no one in the media or among the Democrats went to jail for it.

Sessions Recuses Himself From Russian Nothing-Burger The AG won’t handle the “election interference” case. Matthew Vadum

“As they try to lynch Sessions to appease their crazed base, Democrats are holding a Hypocrisy Olympics right now.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions officially recused himself yesterday from the nonsensical, possibly even nonexistent, federal probe into claims of Russian interference in the election – claims that for all we know were invented by President Trump’s enemies in the intelligence community and the Democratic Party.

Despite the oceans of mass media hysteria, there is still no publicly available trustworthy evidence that the Trump campaign somehow colluded with the Russian government last year. Sources in newspaper articles are never identified. There is not a scintilla of proof of improper conduct. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. All we have is the alleged say-so of faceless CIA spooks whose motives are questionable, to put it charitably.

President Trump called out his predecessor for meddling this week. Accusing Barack Obama of being “behind” the unruly town hall protests and maybe the leaks coming out of the White House, too. A New York Times article from Wednesday stated that in the dying days of the Obama administration officials “spread information” about the alleged Russian tampering in the election and supposed ties between that country and Trump associates “across the government.” Some have called the clues Trump-hating spooks left behind as “intelligence bread crumbs” planted to be discovered later.

It needs to be said that even the theory that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been trying to undermine the public’s faith in American democracy is suspect. The KGB veteran delights in being seen as a puppet master who throws his weight around in other countries. As a few voices in the wilderness have suggested, if Russia is trying to manipulate the American political process, it is in an attempt to shore up Putin’s position at home. In other words, it is a propaganda campaign aimed at Russians in Russia, and the Left is only too happy to help out in order to hurt Trump.

The Sessions-is-a-Russian-traitor story came about just when the Trump administration was basking in the glow of the president’s historic speech to Congress. How convenient. Suddenly good news about Trump evaporates in the news cycle. Poof.

As CNN’s resident self-described “communist” propagandist Van Jones was forced to admit, President Trump’s widely praised address was a game-changer. Trump “became president of the United States in that moment, period.” Jones was moved during Trump’s tribute to fallen Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens, a Navy SEAL, and his widow Carryn Owens. Trump looked towards a visibly emotional Mrs. Owens and said, “Ryan’s legacy is etched into eternity … thank you,” a comment that was followed by a stand ovation that lasted two minutes.

“That was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics,” Jones said. “If he finds a way to do that over and over again, he’s going to be there for eight years.” Not surprisingly, Jones’s simple acknowledgment of reality earned him the wrath of professionally unhinged MSNBC-reject and dead-ender Keith Olbermann and a chorus of other radicals.

Returning to the Sessions story, at a press conference yesterday the attorney general stressed that a recusal is far from an admission of guilt and that the Department of Justice does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations.

Sessions is mindful of the important aphorism that over time has hardened into a legal maxim: “Not only must justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.”