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At the Brooklyn Museum, a Polemical History Lesson In its overhaul of its collection of American art, the Brooklyn Museum fixates on everything that’s shameful in the country’s past. By Lee Rosenbaum

Posted By on September 21st, 2016

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Anne Pasternak, the public-art impresario and museum neophyte who one year ago became director of the Brooklyn Museum, quickly set about unraveling much of what her predecessor, Arnold Lehman, had done over his 18-year tenure. Her concept was commendable—to simplify and clarify installations that many visitors had regarded as chaotic, confusing and cluttered. But the results—particularly as seen in the sweeping overhaul of the encyclopedic museum’s distinguished permanent collection of American art in a mere seven months— suggest that Ms. Pasternak’s ambitions may have exceeded her know-how.

Brought to fruition by assistant curator Connie Choi, a month before Brooklyn’s new full curator of American art, Kimberly Orcutt, arrived on the scene, the reinstallation displays 35% fewer objects than before, eliminating the practice of double-hanging works (one above the other). This means that you no longer have to strain to see works that were hung too high, but it also means that certain artists are no longer shown in depth: For example, Marsden Hartley, an American Modernist painter whose styles ranged from realism to abstraction, was formerly represented by four paintings; now there’s only one.

More problematically, the new installation is sabotaged by political polemics: It seems perversely fixated on what’s shameful in our country’s past. While it’s legitimate to raise uncomfortable issues, the relentlessness of the negative critique makes the installation sometimes seem less a celebration of American culture and achievements than a recitation of our nation’s faults.

The introductory wall text fires a warning shot: “Some of the objects . . . raise difficult, complex issues, since many works were made for and collected by racially and economically privileged segments of society.” In our “Occupy” era, which takes aim at the disparities between the 1% and the 99%, “privilege” attracts potshots.

In the opening section, “The Americas’ First Peoples,” overseen by curator Nancy Rosoff, we are reminded of the “massacre of millions” that haunts our nation’s past. The gold, ceramics and carvings of Native Americans from North, Central and South America take their rightful place at the beginning of this chronological story of American art, with other American Indian objects interspersed throughout the galleries. Latin American artists are included under the rubric of “American Art” and integrated with their U.S. contemporaries.

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The Democrats Have Betrayed Labor Supporting unchecked immigration incompatible with standing for working Americans Michael Cutler

Posted By on September 21st, 2016

There was a time when the Democratic Party provided a voice for American workers. The Democrats of the 20th century advocated for higher wages and better working conditions and opportunities for upward mobility for blue-collar workers.

This was the concept behind the “American Dream” — the notion that anyone who got an education and worked hard and, perhaps, benefited from a bit of luck could write the next great American success story.

Today the Democratic Party, still politically backed by labor unions, has become the main driver behind providing millions of illegal aliens with lawful status.

The Democratic Party viewed itself as the counterpoint to the Republican Party — which, for the most part, was aligned with business owners who predominantly wanted cheaper labor and fewer regulations.

Labor laws and immigration laws were enacted to protect American workers from dangerous working conditions and from unfair competition that foreign workers might provide. In fact, prior to World War II, the enforcement and administration of the immigration laws were the responsibility of the Department of Labor. The authority for the enforcement of immigration laws only shifted to the Justice Department during World War II — when it became apparent that foreign spies and saboteurs could pose a national security threat.

There was balance to America’s politics. Both sides had understandable goals and desires, and through compromise America and Americans benefited and the middle class grew. Wages increased and along with those increasing middle-class wages came more disposable income that enabled large numbers of Americans to live the American Dream.

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Palestinian Terrorist’s Wife to Address Clinton Foundation

Posted By on September 21st, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s totally tone deaf Clinton Foundation will be honoring a Palestinian teacher. The problem arises when you learn that she is married to a terrorist. Hanan an-Hroub will be speaking at a Clinton Global Initiative event to honor her for a teacher award. The event takes place in New York. How’s that for location? Read the story below.http://conservativebyte.com/2016/09/breitbart-palestinian-terrorists-wife-to-address-clinton-foundation/

Hanan an-Hroub is scheduled to speak at a Clinton Global Initiative event in New York after winning a $1 million teaching award from another charity that donates to the Clinton Foundation. Her husband, Omar al-Hroub, spent 10 years in an Israeli prison for his role in a 1980 bombing that killed six Israelis.

The event is going ahead as planned, in spite of the recent Islamist terrorist bombings in New York and New Jersey, which injured dozens.

The Wall Street Journal noted Tuesday:

Omar al-Hroub was convicted on charges that he was an accomplice in a deadly bombing attack in Hebron that killed Israelis walking home from Friday night Sabbath prayers. According to an Associated Press account at the time, Omar al-Hroub was a chemist who provided chemicals needed for making the bombs.

Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said:

Today’s report that the Clinton Foundation is feting the wife of a Palestinian man convicted of helping bomb innocent Israeli citizens is deeply disturbing, especially in the wake of this weekend’s attacks. The decision to honor the wife of a terrorist by Hillary Clinton’s foundation shows a complete lack of judgment and a callousness that should disqualify her from holding the presidency.

The Republican National Committee has also reportedly objected.

The biography for Hanan al-Hroub on the Clinton Foundation website does not mention the terror connection:

Winner of the 2016 Global Teacher Prize, an initiative of the Varkey Foundation, Hanan Al Hroub grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp, Bethlehem, where she was regularly exposed to acts of violence. She went into primary education after her children were left deeply traumatized by a shooting incident they witnessed on their way home from school. Her experiences in meetings and consultations to discuss her children’s behavior, development and academic performance in the years that followed led Al Hroub to try to help others who, having grown up in similar circumstances, require special handling at school. With so many troubled children in the region, Palestinian classrooms can be tense environments. Al Hroub embraces the slogan “No to Violence” and uses a specialized teaching approach she developed herself. Al Hroub has shared her perspective at conferences, meetings and teacher training seminars.

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Greens Should Follow Germany’s Lead And Reject Israel Boycotts by Benjamin Weinthal, Asaf Romirowsky and Sheryl Saperia

Posted By on September 21st, 2016

While Iran’s regime continues to expand its nuclear facilities and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s war has caused a half million deaths, the Green parties in North America are bizarrely preoccupied with boycotting the Jewish state. The parties’ counterpart in Germany is, however, a vehement opponent of the anti-Semitic boycott movement. The German Greens should serve as a model for Canadian and U.S. Greens to revise their anti-Israel positions.

Last month, the Green Party of Canada became the country’s first party to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS) targeting Israel.

BDS claims to seek concessions from Israel to advance the cause of Palestinian statehood. The movement is actually against peace because it seeks to dismantle Israel and to impose a one-state solution, rather than two states for two peoples.

While Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May personally rejects BDS as polarizing, she was overridden on the issue by voting delegates at her party’s annual convention.

It is a topsy-turvy world when a political group devoted to protecting the environment prioritizes BDS over opposing Iran’s nuclear aims — which have the potential to devastate humanity and the environment — and the Assad regime — which, along with its sponsors Iran, Russia and Hezbollah — has engaged in a scorched-earth policy in Syria.

Iran’s Lake Urmia is drying up, Tehran is beset by major air pollution and one of its nuclear facilities — Bushehr — lies on an earthquake-prone area.

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Countering Islamist Terror Requires a Strategy, Not Denial By The Editors

Posted By on September 20th, 2016

On Saturday evening, a bomb packed with metal shrapnel exploded in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea, injuring 29 people, eleven hours after an explosion in Seaside Park, N.J., along the route of a planned Marine Corps charity run. Both bombings — and at least two other attempts, one in Manhattan and one in Elizabeth, N.J. — appear to be the work of Ahmad Khan Rahami, a 28-year-old naturalized citizen from Afghanistan.

The sequence of events, culminating in Rahami’s capture on Monday morning, has coincided with liberal attempts to make the weekend’s goings-on anything other than what they obviously are: Islamic terrorism. On Saturday night, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio called the bombing “an intentional act,” making his own contribution to the roll of Obama-era euphemisms (cf. “man-caused disaster” and “workplace violence”), while on Monday, news that Rahami may not have acted alone prompted a CNN terrorism expert (we use that word advisedly) to propose that “two or three lone wolves may have gotten together.”

We do not yet know much about Ahmad Rahami, but we know a great deal about Islamic terrorism in the United States, on account of a growing catalogue of horrors — Boston, Chattanooga, San Bernardino, Orlando, etc. — and it’s almost certain that Rahami was hoping to stake out a place on that list: According to law enforcement, he traveled to Afghanistan multiple times in recent years, and acquaintances told the New York Times that he had changed dramatically following a trip four years ago. That Rahami failed to do more damage was largely a matter of incompetence and luck. (It’s worth keeping in mind, too, that this is not the first time that New York City has dodged a deadly bombing. In 2010, a car bomb planted in Times Square by Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistan native, ignited but failed to explode.)

Liberals refuse to acknowledge that the United States faces a deadly threat grounded in a distinct ideology. Terrorism is not an expression of frustration at a lack of economic opportunity; Ahmad Rahami was not “acting out” because he couldn’t score a position at the GAP. Terrorism is violence intended to subvert the existing political order, and, in the case of people such as Rahami, to replace it with the political framework required by supremacist Islam. Acknowledging this fact does not require condemning Islam as such; it simply requires acknowledging that there is a strain of Islam, with broad appeal today, that opposes the American way of life.

Our policymaking should be designed around this recognition. Instead, liberal leaders have been hampering counterterror efforts. The Obama administration, incapable of uttering the phrase “Islamic terror,” has drawn down our intelligence efforts at home and abroad, while smearing police departments across the country as racist. Meanwhile, in New York City, Mayor de Blasio caved to the demands of Islamist activists earlier this year and ordered the NYPD to stop using a report that helped officers identify individuals who might be considering terrorism. Far from encouraging profiling of Muslims, the report helped investigators make the distinctions that are crucial to preempting acts of terror.

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NEVER, NEVER TRUMP: VICTOR DAVIS HANSON THE REPUBLICAN DILEMMA

Posted By on September 20th, 2016

Any Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red. Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views.

In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney – once found useful by the media when running against more-conservative Republicans — were reinvented as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of a Frank Capra movie.

When the media got through with a good man like McCain, he was left an adulterous, confused septuagenarian, unsure of how many mansions he owned, and a likely closeted bigot. Another gentleman like Romney was reduced to a comic-book Ri¢hie Ri¢h, who owned an elevator, never talked to his garbage man, hazed innocents in prep school, and tortured his dog on the roof of his car. If it were a choice between shouting down debate moderator Candy Crowley and shaming her unprofessionalism, or allowing her to hijack the debate, Romney in Ajaxian style (“nobly live, or nobly die”) chose the decorous path of dignified abdication.

In contrast, we were to believe Obama’s adolescent faux Greek columns, hokey “lowering the seas and cooling the planet,” vero possumus seal on his podium as president-elect, and 57 states were Lincolnesque.

Why would 2016 not end up again in losing nobly? Would once again campaigning under the Marquess of Queensberry rules win Republicans a Munich reprieve?

The Orangeman Cometh

In such a hysterical landscape, it was possible that no traditional Republican in 2016 was likely to win, even against a flawed candidate like Hillary Clinton, who emerged wounded from a bruising primary win over aged socialist Bernie Sanders.

Then came along the Trump, the seducer of the Right when the Republican establishment was busy early on coronating Jeb Bush. After the cuckolded front-runners imploded, we all assumed that Trump’s successful primary victories — oddly predicated on avoidance of a ground game, internal polling, ad campaigns, sophisticated fundraising, and a sea of consultants and handlers — were hardly applicable to Clinton, Inc. She surely would bury him under a sea of cash, consultants, and sheer manpower.

That Trump was an amateur, a cad, his own worst enemy, cynically leveraging a new business or brand, and at any time could say anything was supposedly confirmation of Hillary’s inevitable victory. Her winning paradigm was seen as simply anti-Trump rather than pro-Hillary: light campaigning to conserve her disguised fragile health, while giving full media attention to allow Trump to elucidate his fully obnoxious self. Her campaign was to be a series of self-important selfies, each more flattering to the beholder but otherwise of no interest to her reluctant supporters.

For insurance, Clinton would enlist the bipartisan highbrow Washington establishment to close ranks, with their habitual tsk-tsking of Trump in a nuanced historical context — “Hitler,” “Stalin,” “Mussolini,” “brown shirt,” etc.

Hillary would rely on the old Obama team of progressive hit men in the public-employee unions, the news ministries, the pajama-boy bloggers, the race industry, and the open-borders lobbies to brand Trump supporters as racist, sexist, misogynist, Islamophobic, nativist, homophobic. The shades of Obama’s old white reprehensible “Clingers” would spring back to life as “The Deplorables.”

Yet for all Hillary’s hundreds of millions of corporate dollars and legions of Clinton Foundation strategists, she could never quite shake Trump, who at 70 seemed more like a frenzied 55. Trump at his worst was never put away by Hillary at her best, and he has stayed within six to eight points for most of his awful August and is now nipping her heels as October nears.

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A Bloody Day of Muslim Refugee Terror Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on September 20th, 2016

Islamic terrorism is caused by Muslim migration.

The wave of Muslim refugee terror began with a bomb targeting a U.S. Marine charity run in New Jersey. By evening a pressure cooker full of shrapnel has exploded outside a Manhattan building for the blind. An hour later, a rampaging Muslim terrorist began stabbing people inside a Macy’s, asking them if they were Muslim and shouting the name of “Allah,” the genocidal Islamic deity of mass murder.

And that was one Saturday, two Muslim refugees and a wave of national terror 1,200 miles apart.

What did Elizabeth, New Jersey and St. Cloud, Minnesota have in common?

New Jersey has the second largest Muslim population in the country. This isn’t the first time it was used as a staging ground for Muslim terror.

11 of the 19 September 11 hijackers hung out in Paterson (known colloquially as Paterstine). Head toward Jersey City and you can see where Muslim enemies of this country stood on rooftops and cheered the attacks on September 11. It’s also where the World Trade Center bombing mastermind and the Blind Sheikh who provided religious guidance for a proposed wave of Islamic terror operated.

Go south and in Elizabeth you can pass the First American Fried Chicken joint where the Rahami clan made life miserable for their American neighbors before one of their spawn began his bombing spree.

New Jersey is a map of Muslim terror plots because of its huge Muslim population.

Ahmad Khan Rahami came to America as the son of an Afghan refugee. He stabbed a man two years ago. His family was a local nuisance who cried “Islamophobia” at the least provocation. His brother was a Jihadi sympathizer and may have fled the country after assaulting a police officer. By the time Ahmad was done, he had wounded a police officer and 29 other people. If his plot had succeeded, he might have pulled off the largest Muslim terror atrocity in the country since September 11.

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Defending Ourselves to Death Why, despite their good intentions, Israeli leaders are failing the country. Caroline Glick

Posted By on September 20th, 2016

Moshav Hagor is located in the center of the country.

Successive IDF chiefs of General Staff, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Dan Halutz and Lt. Gen. (ret.) Gabi Ashkenazy hail from the farming community established in 1949 by veterans of the Palmach.

Along with their neighbors in Moshav Yarchiv, for the past decade, the farmers of Hagor have been subjected to the continuous desecration of their communal cemetery by their Muslim neighbors from Jaljulia, a Muslim town of ten thousand located between the two moshavim.

Adjacent to a school in Jaljulia, Hagor’s cemetery has been subjected to abuse of all kinds. Residents regularly find animal carcasses at the entrance to the cemetery. Garbage is routinely dumped on graves.

Human and other feces are frequently smeared across headstones.

One night, all the headstones on all the graves at the cemetery were broken.

Residents mourning their dead are harassed.

After a decade of constant abuse, Hagor’s residents despaired of ever restoring the security to their cemetery and decided to take matters into the own hands. With the halachic approval of then chief rabbi Shlomo Amar, they built an alternative cemetery in another area of their moshav. Families paid thousands of shekels to reinter their loved ones at the new site. Today the only bodies remaining in their original graves are the ones with no living relatives to pay to move them.

Several years ago, Moshav Yarchiv’s cemetery was rezoned to become a new neighborhood in Jaljulia.

An attempt by Yarchiv’s residents to fence off the cemetery failed.

The day after they installed the fence it was stolen.

The rabbinate has refused on halachic grounds to permit Yarchiv’s residents to exhume and reinter their dead. But even if they had rabbinic permission, they have nowhere else to bury them. Due to bureaucratic hurdles, Yarchiv hasn’t been able to find an alternative burial ground.

Jaljulya once had good relations with its Jewish neighbors. But over the past decade, the town has become a hotbed for Islamic radicalism. Residents built a new massive mosque in the town. Despite repeated complaints from their Jewish neighbors, the mosque’s loudspeakers, which face Hagor, deliberately blast the call to prayer in the middle of the night.

Last October, Nedal Salah of Jaljulia paraglided into Syria from the Golan Heights and joined Islamic State. Following Salah’s action, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) discovered a cell of six more town residents who had transferred their loyalties to Islamic State, which they intended to travel to Syria to join.

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Jimmy Carter: Originator of the Orwellian Term ‘Undocumented Immigrant’ How the former president manipulated immigration enforcement policy to influence elections. Michael Cutler

Posted By on September 20th, 2016

On the tail of the firestorm that Hillary Clinton ignited by describing supporters of Donald Trump as belonging in her “basket of deplorables” because they support immigration law enforcement, purportedly out of xenophobia and other irrational fears, Jimmy Carter went public with his outrageous proclamations that there is a “resurgence of racism”: As CBS News reported,

Carter said some white Americans stay quiet when they see discrimination or segregation, fearful of losing a “privileged” position in society. He said that amounts to acceptance of “discrimination and animosity and hatred and division.”

Carter, a lifelong Baptist, often spoke about his faith during his political career. Now 91, he continues to teach Sunday school several times a month at a church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia.

Carter said he wanted the event to stay nonpolitical, but described “some degree of embarrassment” about the ongoing presidential campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. He said Americans’ multiple races, ethnicities and religions form “a beautiful mosaic” and said the country has been “resilient” following other periods of deep division, including the Civil War.

It was, as you will see, Jimmy Carter who intentionally twisted the public perception about immigration law enforcement for political purposes in ways that most Americans likely don’t know.

The term “alien” has all but been stricken from the vernacular when applied to foreigners who are present in the United States. Some “journalists” and politicians actually become agitated when the term “illegal alien” is used to describe aliens who are illegally present in the United States, equating that terminology with “hate speech.”

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Robert Gates’ Stealth Endorsement of Hillary Gates’ intriguing vision of who can and cannot be redeemed. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on September 20th, 2016

“As Robert Kaufmann wrote recently,

A vote for Hillary Clinton is therefore a vote for Mr. Obama’s dangerous doctrine, which fears American power more than it fears our enemies. As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton contributed enormously to lowering the barriers to aggression everywhere—with much worse to come unless we reverse course.

Gates’ “pox on both your houses” rhetoric in the end leaves the door open to voting for Hillary, based solely on taking seriously campaign words while ignoring a 25-year-long record of dangerous deeds.”

Robert M. Gates, ex-CIA chief and Secretary of Defense for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, published a column in the Wall Street Journal last week criticizing both Trump and Hillary for their their lack of “credibility” on foreign policy. This seemingly even-handed critique, however, is in fact an exercise in an apples-and-oranges comparison that ends up as a back-handed endorsement of Hillary.

Gates begins with a well-known survey of the mess Barack Obama’s foreign policies will leave his successor. A surging China threatens the Far East despite the “pivot” to Asia. Vladimir Putin is expanding everywhere on Russia’s western border, and in the Middle East has replaced the U.S. as the number one power broker. Putin also has serially gulled our mediocre Secretary of State John Kerry with “cease fires” that give cover to his aggression, and exposed our president’s gutlessness by buzzing our naval vessels and taunting our military aircraft. North Korea has just tested a nuclear device and intercontinental missiles that can reach as far as Chicago. And ISIS continues to hold ground in Iraq and Syria, and inspire terrorist franchises and attacks in Europe, the U.S., and Africa. And of course, there is the disastrous appeasement of Iran on nukes, along with the mullocracy’s active support for terrorism and serial humiliation of the U.S.

For each crisis, Gates explains, neither Trump nor Hillary offer any specific strategy or response that can even start to repair this dangerous erosion of American prestige and influence. Rather, as Gates says of their announced plans for rolling back ISIS, both candidates propose what “in essence sounds like what President Obama is doing now—with more ideological fervor and some additional starch”.

Yet at this point Gates makes the same mistake (or employs the same rhetorical tactic) of the NeverTrump folks. He does not distinguish between Trump’s campaign rhetoric and Hillary’s long record of failure, only specifically mentioning one example, the intervention in Libya. No word of her active support of the “reset” with Russia that encouraged Putin’s geopolitical adventurism. Nor any mention of her role in the Iranian deal, easily the worst foreign policy mistake since World War II, given the stakes of allowing an apocalyptic cult to possess nuclear weapons.

Nor does he say a word about Clinton’s obvious character flaws––her long record of sacrificing the country’s security and interests to her own political and financial gain, as she did with her unsecured private server and her pay-for-play State Department. Nor does he mention Hillary’s numerous health issues that raise serious questions about whether she will be physically and cognitively able to handle a crisis.

“When it comes to credibility problems, though, Donald Trump is in a league of his own,” Gates asserts. Yet his catalogue of sins refers to campaign rhetoric and personal style, and even then Gates’ take on Trump’s comments is tendentious. For example, Gates criticizes the wall with Mexico proposed by Trump, which would enhance security by making it more difficult for terrorists to infiltrate the U.S. Next comes the old tired charge that Trump’s suggestion we bring back enhanced interrogation techniques advocates “torture.” Waterboarding is not torture under current U.S. statute, as even Eric Holder told Congress in May of 2009. And as ex-CIA director George Tenet detailed in his memoirs, it delivered valuable information that prevented numerous attacks and helped locate bin Laden’s hideout. Gates here is recycling an old progressive smear against George W. Bush. As for Trump’s call for “killing [terrorists’] families,” what does he think Obama’s drone strikes do at times? And is Gates now morally condemning Allied strategic bombing of Germany and Japan, which killed nearly a million civilians?

Then there’s Trump’s offhand comments about Putin’s qualities as a good leader for a “system” Trump said he doesn’t like. We’re supposed to think Trump’s words are more consequential than Hillary’s and Obama’s appeasing deeds that empowered Putin’s aggressive foreign policy? Or more significant than Obama’s pledge to be more “flexible” with Russia after his re-election? And given that the U.S. has dealt with much more murderous leaders like Mao and Khrushchev, does Gates and other NeverTrumpers think future dealings with Putin will be easier or harder if Trump preens morally about Putin’s evil like the pundits and retired government officials free of accountability do? More likely, hard-nosed calculations of national interest on both sides will be more important than American presidential campaign rhetoric whether positive or negative.