ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Coming Out of the Basement During the author’s girlhood, ‘the Jews were as long ago as the Egyptians and as exotic as Indians.’ Then, at 19, she learned she was one. By Joshua Rubenstein

Posted By on August 29th, 2016

The 20th century’s darkest moments have inspired more than a few illuminating memoirs, and Agata Tuszyńska’s “Family History of Fear” belongs in their number. It is one of a cluster of remembrances that, drawing on family history, look back on genocide and war and record their aftereffects. Such narratives can be personal and yet also encompass the fate of whole nations trying to reconstitute themselves after so much ordeal.

Ms. Tuszyńska, a poet and writer from Warsaw, begins by giving us the origins of her own story before broadening her gaze to include earlier generations. She was born in 1957 to a Jewish mother and Polish father. Her mother, with her dark eyes and dark hair, was “happy to have brought a little blue-eyed blond into the world”: She had not wanted to weigh her daughter down “with a burden heavier than I could bear,” Ms. Tuszyńska writes. “She didn’t want her child to have to grow up with a feeling of injustice and fear.”

Ms. Tuszyńska’s mother, Halina, had every reason to want her daughter to avoid the burden of history. As a child, Halina had survived the war when her own mother—Agata’s grandmother—had walked with Halina through a courthouse on the edge of the Warsaw ghetto that opened onto the “Aryan” side of the city. She discreetly removed her armband—the telltale sign that they were Jews—and began an odyssey of survival, seeking hidden shelters and staying clear of the German occupiers. “Mother wanted to erase the past. To be as far as possible from the basements where she had to hide.”
ENLARGE
Photo: wsj
Family History of Fear

By Agata Tuszynska
Knopf, 381 pages, $27.95

For much of Ms. Tuszyńska’s own girlhood, she tells us, she felt that “the Jews were as long ago as the Egyptians and as exotic as Indians.” Then, when she was 19, she learned that her mother was Jewish—and that she herself was a Jew. Ms. Tuszyńska was determined to “reverse the course of forgetting” and explore the shrouded history of her family.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Look Who’s Getting That Bank Settlement Cash Tens of millions of dollars disguised as ‘consumer relief’ are going to liberal political groups By Andy Koenig

Posted By on August 29th, 2016

Imagine if the president of the United States forced America’s biggest banks to funnel hundreds of millions—and potentially billions—of dollars to the corporations and lobbyists who supported his agenda, all while calling it “Main Street Relief.” The public outcry would rightly be deafening. Yet the Obama administration has used a similar strategy to enrich its political allies, advance leftist pet projects, and protect its legacy—and hardly anyone has noticed.

The administration’s multiyear campaign against the banking industry has quietly steered money to organizations and politicians who are working to ensure liberal policy and political victories at every level of government. The conduit for this funding is the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, a coalition of federal and state regulators and prosecutors created in 2012 to “identify, investigate, and prosecute instances of wrongdoing” in the residential mortgage-backed securities market. In conjunction with the Justice Department, the RMBS Working Group has reached multibillion-dollar settlements with essentially every major bank in America.

The most recent came in April when the Justice Department announced a $5.1 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs. In February Morgan Stanley agreed to a $3.2 billion settlement. Previous targets were Citigroup ($7 billion), J.P. Morgan Chase ($13 billion), and Bank of America, which in 2014 reached the largest civil settlement in American history at $16.65 billion. Smaller deals with other banks have also been announced.

Combined, the banks must divert well over $11 billion into “consumer relief,” which is supposed to benefit homeowners harmed during the Great Recession. Yet it is unknown how much, if any, of the banks’ settlement money will find its way to individual homeowners. Instead, a substantial portion is allocated to private, nonprofit organizations drawn from a federally approved list. Some groups on the list—Catholic Charities, for instance—are relatively nonpolitical. Others—La Raza, the National Urban League, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and more—are anything but. CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Keeping Turkey in the U.S. Orbit Leaders from Kiev to Jerusalem to Tokyo are familiar with Ankara’s discontent with Obama.

Posted By on August 29th, 2016

Turkey is living through a 24/7 state of emergency. The latest alarm came Thursday with an assassination attempt on the leader of the secular opposition. Kemal Kilicdaroglu was traveling the country’s northeast when his convoy came under fire. A member of his security detail was killed in the shootout, but Mr. Kilicdaroglu was unharmed and evacuated by helicopter. The perpetrators escaped, though Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s aides say his bodyguards may have killed one of them.

“Even though we are attacked, we will continue with determination in the path that we believe in,” Mr. Kilicdaroglu said in an interview Friday at the headquarters of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP. The separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, took credit but said government security forces, not Mr. Kilicdaroglu, were the intended target.

In today’s Turkey such incidents capture headlines only to be overshadowed a few hours later by the next thing to go bang. Sure enough, hours after the Kilicdaroglu attempt, a truck bomb on Friday killed 11 Turkish police officers near the Syrian border. The PKK also claimed responsibility for that attack.

Life goes on. Men and women still gather in outdoor bars to sip raki, watch soccer and shoot the breeze. The margin of personal freedom remains wider than in most of the region. Even so, the mood is dark. With July’s failed coup, nearly three million Syrian refugees, a fresh PKK insurgency in the southeast and the menace of Islamic State, the Turks feel they can’t catch a break.

The Turkey emerging out of these manifold crises is more insular, paranoid and illiberal. This means Ankara may no longer be as solidly anchored in the West as it has been since the Cold War. Washington assigns the blame for this turn to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and rightly so in Turkey’s domestic sphere. But the president isn’t alone to blame for Ankara’s troubles abroad.

Mr. Erdogan’s project to concentrate power in the presidency was well under way before the coup attempt on July 15. Most serious observers here believe followers of the Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gülen organized the ill-fated coup. Few have forgotten that the Gülenists were the authoritarian handmaidens to Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, before the two Islamist camps turned on each other in 2013. In the mid-2000s, when Messrs. Erdogan and Gülen were still allies, well-placed Gülenists in the judiciary persecuted and sidelined a common enemy: the old secular establishment.

The failed coup has accelerated Mr. Erdogan’s will to power. But it has also rallied much of the country behind his grievance narrative. Turks, secular and pious, feel betrayed. The West lectures them about the post-coup purges, they complain, without acknowledging the deep trauma of the coup itself: the putschist pilots who buzzed their apartments, the tanks that rolled down their streets.

Meanwhile, pro-government media feed the population a steady diet of ever-nuttier propaganda suggesting U.S. involvement in the coup attempt. Mr. Kilicdaroglu, the opposition leader, says the ruling party’s dominance over media leaves little doubt that it is “guiding the public.” A Western diplomat puts it nicely: “The government shapes public opinion and then claims to be constrained by that same opinion.”

Then again, externalizing responsibility for one’s destiny is nothing new in this part of the world. The relevant question for the American national interest is how to prevent this strategically crucial country from drifting further toward Russia’s orbit and away from the U.S.-led security order—or what remains of it after eight years of President Barack Obama.

Here the Turks ought to be listened to. Not all of Ankara’s lashing out at Washington derives from Mr. Erdogan’s cynicism and ideological hubris. Some of it is in reaction to the same sudden shift in U.S. policy under Mr. Obama that has jolted allies world-wide. Leaders from Kiev to Jerusalem to Tokyo are familiar with Ankara’s discontent.

Turkey has felt the jolt most acutely in Syria. Mr. Erdogan took Mr. Obama at his word when the American said in 2011 that Bashar Assad “must go.” He also took seriously Mr. Obama’s red line on chemical weapons. Turkey’s much-maligned early policy in Syria included overt support for moderate rebels and a laissez-faire policy that enabled the movement of more hard-line jihadists into the country. Ankara expected that Washington would favor its traditional allies and disfavor others: namely the Iranian mullahs, Mr. Assad and their various Shiite proxies.

Mr. Obama scrambled that friend-enemy pattern. He awkwardly ignored the red line, and the U.S. carried out secret talks that would culminate in a nuclear deal with Tehran and tie America’s hands against Mr. Assad. Then came a second shock to the Turks. America increasingly relied on Syrian-Kurdish factions with close ties to the Turkish PKK as its main ground forces in the country. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hillary and the Soros Agenda By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Posted By on August 29th, 2016

These days, George Soros’ connections are getting quite a bit more attention than they did in the 1990s. But by the end of Bill Clinton’s reign Soros had already obtained a very influential position with the Clintons, especially with Hillary.

In her excellent profile of Soros in The New Yorker, on January 23, 1995, Connie Bruck relates how Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s friend, who served as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser on the New Independent States to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, saw Soros. According to Talbott, Soros was “a national resource – indeed, a national treasure.” He described the billionaire as a sort of shadow arm of the State Department. “I would say that it [Soros’ foreign policy] is not identical to the foreign policy of the U.S. government, but it’s compatible with it, “he told The New Yorker. “It’s like working with a friendly, allied, independent entity, if not a government. We try to synchronize our approach to the former Communist countries with Germany, France, Great Britain, and with George Soros.”

When Soros opened his own D.C. office to be close to the action, one of his minions explained that it would serve as “his State Department.” Soros conceded, “Of course what I do could be called meddling because I want to promote an open society.” According to Soros, such an” Open society transcends national sovereignty.” He also proposed “modification of the concept of sovereignty” because “sovereignty is basically somewhat anachronistic.”

Soros wrote memos on every foreign policy and monetary issue imaginable, and these memos were read widely at the very highest echelons of the Clinton White House. Soros has also used the services of the Washington lobbying firm Raffaelli, Spees, Springer & Smith, where he was represented by Clinton hack Terry McAuliffe, who in 2005 became the Democratic National Committee Chairman, and in 2008 chaired Hillary’s presidential campaign (McAuliffe has been Governor of Virginia since 2014). Between his payments to McAuliffe and the hundreds of thousands of dollars he gave to various official Democratic PACs, Soros was clearly able to purchase himself quite a bit of clout in the Democratic Party, and gain the adoration/co-dependency of its members that continues to this day.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS….MARGARET SANGER? DANIEL FLYNN

Posted By on August 28th, 2016

The Standard Bearer of Bull Connor’s Party Calls Trump Racist

A Hillary Clinton campaign video featuring Confederate flags and goobers in white sheets ominously informs, “If Trump wins, they could be running the country.”

Mike Tyson didn’t bite Evander Holyfield’s ears because the knockout artist felt he was winning.

Such flouting of the Marquess of Queensberry rules of politics (a much rougher sport than boxing) coming in late summer rather than mid fall demonstrates either desperation, deviousness, or both. Though Clinton holds a lead — sometimes slight, sometimes sizable — in recent polls, she suffered through one of the worst weeks of her campaign.

The Associated Press proved that donating money to her “charity” served as the best way to secure a meeting with her as secretary of state. Eighty-five of the 154 people outside of government successful in gaining face time with the secretary did so after donating to the Clinton Foundation.

Rather than answer questions, Clinton attempted to change the subject by going below the belt. “Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia,” Mrs. Clinton maintained Thursday in a Reno speech. “He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties.”

The depiction of a Queens Kleagle strikes as far-fetched. The world of mullets, meth, and monster trucks seems as far removed from Trump Tower as one can imagine. But Clinton-Kaine seeks to strangely make it all stick. And hey, he fired Omarosa, didn’t he?

The chutzpah of the negative campaigning appears especially audacious when considering the history of the Democratic Party and, to a lesser extent, its standard bearer.

Hillary Clinton called Senator Robert Byrd not a racist but her “mentor.” From the beginning of the Carter presidency until the end of the Reagan administration, Hillary’s party looked to the former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops as its exalted leader in the United States Senate.

Hillary Clinton accepted the Margaret Sanger Award in 2009. “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously,” she told Planned Parenthood, “her courage, her tenacity, her vision.” But this vision included blaming Jews and Italians for causing “the multiplication of the unfit in this country,” judging “the Aboriginal Australian” the “lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development,” and using the n-word in private correspondence. If she sounds like an ideal speaker for a KKK rally in some barn, that’s because Sanger really once spoke at a KKK rally in some barn.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey’s Official “Cocktail Terror” by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on August 28th, 2016

In its latest attack in Turkey, ISIS used a child suicide bomber to attack a wedding ceremony. More than 50 victims were killed, of whom 26 were less than 18 years old.

This is premeditated, officially-tolerated murder. Evidence? Two opposition parties appealed to parliament five times asking for a parliamentary investigation into ISIS and its activities in Turkey. All five requests were rejected by the votes of the ruling AKP Party, Erdogan’s powerful political machine.

The opposition claims SADAT International Defense Consultancy, which was established by soldiers dismissed from the military due to Islamist activities, offers ISIS operatives training in “intelligence, psychological warfare, sabotage, raiding, ambushing and assassination.” Erdogan this month appointed the owner of SADAT, retired Brigadier General Adnan Tanriverdi, as his chief presidential advisor.

Failing to name Islamic terror has cost Turkey hundreds of lives and will likely cost it hundreds more, as the country’s leaders — and many others, especially in the West — are still too demure to call Islamic terror by its name. Without a realistic diagnosis, the chances of a successful treatment are always close to nil, and Turkey’s leaders stubbornly remain on the wrong side of the right diagnosis.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s theory that “there is no Islamic terror,” coupled with his persistent arguments that Islamist radicals hit Europe because of Islamophobia in the Western world, are not only too remote from reality but have now become a curse in his own country.

As early as 2014, cars began to be seen in the streets of Istanbul sporting the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The same year, Islamists opened a shop selling T-shirts featuring the same flag. ISIS-related magazines went ahead with open hate content even though, in March 2014, ISIS spilled its first blood in Turkey when an ISIS team ambushed a police checkpoint and killed one police officer, one soldier and one civilian.

In its first suicide attack on June 5, 2015, ISIS targeted a pro-Kurdish rally in Diyarbakir, killed four people and injured 279. It targeted, once again, a pro-Kurdish gathering in July 2015 in Suruc, a small town bordering Syria, killed more than 30 people and injured more than 100.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How to Sustain a False Police Shooting Crisis The facts are a mere inconvenience for progressives stoking racial conflict. By David French

Posted By on August 28th, 2016

It’s hard to recall a political movement built on more verifiable lies and misinformation than Black Lives Matter, which exists to advance that notion that America is in the midst of a race-motivated epidemic of police shootings. From “hands up, don’t shoot” to the extraordinary claim that it’s “open season” on young black men, America is awash in rhetoric and fury that is already proving to be deadly to police and deadly to black communities across the United States.

Even worse, the rhetoric persists in spite of the facts: Individual stories of police misconduct are often far more complex than activists portray, and the accumulated data shows that black men are not, in fact, facing a wave of racist police killings. For a summary of the available evidence, Heather Mac Donald’s video is outstanding:

Yet the narrative has been fixed. The crisis must be sustained, evidence be damned.

Vox has an interesting feature called a “card stack,” a site dedicated to a single issue, allowing you to quickly click through specific links and educate yourself. They created a card stack about police brutality — and it is a textbook example of how the sophisticated progressive looks at racial issues. This is how the Left sustains a false racial crisis:

Step One — Begin with the misleading use of statistics.

After some throat-clearing about how American police use force more than police in many other countries — conveniently ignoring the fact that we also have much higher rates of violent crime than those nations — Vox gets right to the heart of leftist thinking about race: “There are huge racial disparities in how U.S. police use force.” The proof for that statement? Black people are a mere 13 percent of the population but comprise a whopping 31 percent of all people killed by police.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Keep Swinging, Mr. President Golfing is the best thing Barack Obama does. By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on August 28th, 2016

Set aside Barack Obama the private man, about whom even now relatively little is known. The most likeable thing about Barack Obama the public man is his dedication to golf.

Conservatives hate President Obama’s commitment to his tee times. Or at least we pretend to. The talk-radio ranters and the cable-news mouthholes have tried to bully the president out of his leisure, going on and on about his putting around Martha’s Vineyard or Porcupine Creek while the world burns or Baton Rouge is submerged.

Those complaints are partly insincere — something has to fill up the minutes between doggie-vitamin commercials — and partly are an indirect complaint about media bias. Yes, the same press that savaged George W. Bush for his golfing and for his allegedly excessive vacation schedule has nothing to say about President Obama’s following that example. That is the way of things: Jackie Kennedy spent a little coin sprucing up the White House and she was single-handedly conferring “class” on the nation at large; Nancy Reagan bought a new set of china and it was the biggest crisis since Suez. The New York Times sniffed at Mrs. Reagan for ordering $200,000 worth of new Lenox for White House formal dinners; Mrs. Obama spent $290,000 on a single painting (by Alma Thomas) when she was redecorating a room in the White House — nothing. Mrs. Obama’s painting was not paid for by taxpayers, but then neither was Mrs. Reagan’s China, the tab for which was picked up by the nice people at the J. P. Knapp Foundation.

The hypocrisy should be noted, and complained about, but we should not let it make asses of us, if we can avoid it.

So Barack Obama likes his golf game.

There are some obvious and practical reasons not to discourage President Obama’s sporting pursuits. The most obvious of them is that every hour Barack Obama spends on the links is an hour he is not wrecking the republic, distorting its character, throwing monkey wrenches into its constitutional machinery, or appointing sundry miscreants and malefactors to its high offices. If golf is the only prophylactic we have against him, then Scotland’s second-greatest contribution to modern civilization is to be celebrated for doing work that the Supreme Court and Congress can’t quite manage.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Back to Campus, Where Due Process Is a Myth By Tom Knighton

Posted By on August 28th, 2016

Colleges are supposed to be places of learning. However, many argue they’ve become liberal indoctrination centers, dedicated to churning out legions of progressive zombies who can parrot the Democratic Party’s platform verbatim — yet can’t actually do anything useful to support themselves, or society.

Liberals, unsurprisingly, deny this.

However, there appears to be a movement afoot on college campuses that should alarm liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike.

By now, most readers of this site are bound to be familiar with the persecution of men suspected of sexual assault on campuses throughout the nation. And yes, using “persecution” rather than “prosecution” is intentional. Prosecution implies they will be put through the unalienable rights-based American legal system. That isn’t true anymore.

As your kids head off to school, they should be aware that sexual assault isn’t the only situation where college officials now figure silly things like due process should be completely ignored:

The University of California-San Diego routinely hides the identity of witnesses that could help students accused of wrongdoing exonerate themselves, departing from its own rules on who is “relevant” to an investigation.

This policy, which has been applied against accused students for at least the past five years, was not publicly known until 11 months ago. A state appeals court fleshed out its existence in a due-process lawsuit against the school by a student who was found responsible for cheating and expelled.

That court struck down UCSD’s ruling against Jonathan Dorfman, saying it had no legal reason to withhold the identity of “Student X” — whose test answers Dorfman allegedly copied — from him.

The claim that Dorfman copied answers from “Student X” would assume the two sit near one another. However, without knowing the identity of the student, Dorfman can’t establish whether he was sitting near “Student X” on the day of the exam or not.

So how did they “prove” his guilt? CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

There is no moral basis to oppose Trump By J. Marsolo

Posted By on August 28th, 2016

On August 19, 2016, Douglas Ernst, of The Washington Times, reported that William Bennett, former secretary of education and author of the Virtues books, declared that holier-than-thou so-called Republicans and conservatives should put the interests of our country above their “vanity” and “moral superiority.” Bennett said: “Donald Trumpdoes not need to speak to the ‘Never Trumpers,’ some of my friends – or maybe former friends – who suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country,”

There are many articles and comments here at American Thinker and other websites setting forth the reasons why we should vote for Trump to defeat Hillary. A brief summary of the reasons is that Hillary is a lying crook who will be the third term of Obama. Obamacare will be here to stay, and a Hillary Supreme Court will weaken the Second Amendment by upholding state and local laws on owning and carrying firearms. The nanny state will grow with more regulations. There will be no wall on the southern border, and illegal immigration will continue. Further, Hillary will allow immigration of Syrian and other Middle Eastern “refugees” without proper vetting, which will increase terrorist attacks in our country.

Hillary’s past misdeeds are too much to recount, such as Whitewater and covering up Bill’s rape of Juanita Broaddrick and other sexual misconduct. Worse are the current email scandal, where she destroyed emails relating to her work as secretary of state, and her activities on behalf of the Clinton Foundation. But the absolute worst is her failure to provide the requested security at Benghazi and then compounding it by lying that the cause was a video. She lied to help Obama win the 2012 election and to maintain her political viability. And now she runs an ad attacking Trump for saying that Mrs. Khan had nothing to say while Mr. Khan attacked Trump at the Democrat convention. Hillary has no shame and no conscience, and she will do and say anything to make money and get power.

The NeverTrumpers act, as Bennett said, from “moral superiority.” They say it is only a choice of the lesser evil, and they cannot vote for evil. This is complete nonsense. There is nothing evil about Trump. You may not like some of his words and statements, but there is nothing evil about his conduct. Covering up a rape, using the office of secretary of state to make money, destroying the email evidence and lying about it, and lying to the mother of Sean Smith are evil. There is no moral equivalence between the conduct of Hillary and the words of Trump.

The NeverTrumpers do not act from “moral superiority” because there are not legitimate facts to support a claim that the choice between Hillary and Trump is a choice between two evils.

As Bennett says, if you care about the best interests and welfare of our country, then you have to vote for Trump to defeat Hillary. It is common sense based on the facts.