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One Week After Orlando, Democrats Feature Anti-Gay Imam at Banquet Shafayat Mohamed decries gay Muslims and claims gay sex causes natural disasters. Joe Kaufman

Posted By on June 28th, 2016

The Democratic Party used to embrace homosexuals. Now, its Florida leaders are inviting enemies of the gay community to speak at their functions, and only one week following one of the worst episodes of violence against gays in American history. That was the case earlier this month, when anti-gay imam Maulana Shafayat Mohamed was allowed to speak at the Leadership Blue Gala, the annual banquet of the Florida Democratic Party.

On June 19th, the Florida Democratic Party held its annual Leadership Blue Gala event. US Senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker, was the keynote speaker. However, one of the other speakers, Maulana Shafayat Mohamed, who partook in opening prayers, should have been the main concern.

Shafayat Mohamed is the imam of the Darul Uloom mosque, located in Pembroke Pines, Florida. The mosque has been a haven for terror-related individuals, many of whom have been imprisoned – or, in one case, killed in an overseas anti-insurgent raid – due to their jihadist activities.

“Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla was a student of Shafayat Mohamed’s at Darul Uloom. Now-deceased al-Qaeda Global Operations Chief, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, was a prayer leader at Darul Uloom. And Darul Uloom Arabic teacher Imran Mandhai, along with mosque goers Hakki Aksoy and Shueyb Mossa Jokhan, hatched a plot at the mosque to blow up different South Florida structures, including area power stations, Jewish businesses, and a National Guard armory.

Shafayat Mohamed has his own sordid history. In February 2005, an article written by him was published on the Darul Uloom website, entitled ‘Tsunami: Wrath of God.’ In it, he claims that gay sex caused the 2004 Indonesian tsunami and that most Jews and Christians, whom he refers to as “People of the Book,” are “perverted transgressors.”

It is statements such as these that have gotten Shafayat Mohamed thrown off of a number of Broward County boards. Yet, the imam is unrepentant.

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Abbas’s Satisfied Customers Why European leaders cheer accusations of Jews poisoning Palestinian wells.Caroline Glick

Posted By on June 28th, 2016

“Our only prospect for impacting this diseased, racist environment is to appeal to the conscience of those Europeans who still have one. Beyond that, the time has come to write them off.”

One of the more remarkable aspects of the blood libel sounded by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in his address before the European Parliament in Brussels last week is the claim that he ad-libbed the part about rabbis poisoning Palestinian wells.

After refusing to meet President Reuven Rivlin who was also in Brussels last week, Abbas ascended the podium in Brussels and began his custom of demonizing Jewish and Israel. Clearing his throat, the man whose incitement is most responsible for the fact that the Palestinians are the most anti-Semitic people in the world, began his speech by saying, “We are against incitement.”

Then, as is his wont, Abbas proceeded to incite mass murder of Jews by accusing rabbis of ordering the poisoning of Palestinian wells.

In his words, “Just a week ago, a week, a group of rabbis in Israel announced, in a clear announcement, demanding their government, to poison, to poison, the water of the Palestinians.”

“Is this not incitement? Is this not clear incitement, to the mass murder of the Palestinian people?” It’s not quite clear what it was that he was ad-libbing but a reasonable bet is that he was embellishing what was already in his planned speech. In the days preceding his speech, the Abbas-controlled PLO media put out stories claiming that a non-existent rabbi, who heads a non-existent rabbinical council issued an opinion that Jews in Judea and Samaria should poison Palestinian wells.

As the IsraellyCool website pointed out, by Abbas’s telling, it wasn’t just one non-existent rabbi, who heads a non-existent rabbinical council that told Jews in general to poison wells. In Abbas’s ad-libbed version, the entire non-existent council, led by the non-existent rabbi ordered the government to poison Palestinian water.

At any rate, whether Abbas winged the blood libel or just embellished a less powerful one, far from being a mitigating factor for judging the significance of his statement, the claim that he was speaking on the fly makes it all the worse.

Abbas simply couldn’t help himself.

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Why Our Leaders Won’t Name the Enemy The truth would destroy them. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on June 28th, 2016

After the Orlando attack, Obama ranted that it did not matter what we called Islamic terrorism. “What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIS less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.”

The “Islamic terrorists by any other name would smell as sweet” argument is the last resort of the losing side. It dismisses the whole issue as a matter of semantics with no bearing on the real world.

And that’s a neat rhetorical trick for the political side that relentlessly refuses to acknowledge reality.

One of the more shocking moments in Jeffrey Goldberg’s extended Atlantic write-up of Obama’s foreign policy came with his conversation with the Prime Minister of Australia. Obama, who has refused to recognize any connection between Islamic theology and violence, and made the hijab into a civil rights issue, told the Australian leader how he had seen Indonesia turn to “fundamentalist” Islam and noted, unfavorably, the large numbers of women now wearing hijabs as a sign of that fundamentalism.

Obama blamed the Saudis for pushing Wahhabism through imams and madrassas into Indonesia.

It wasn’t an original critique, but also not one that you hear much in Obama’s circles. When Obama reportedly tells world leaders that there will be “no comprehensive solution to Islamist terrorism until Islam reconciles itself to modernity” and undergoes reforms the way that Christianity did, it’s like suddenly having Khrushchev explain why Communism can’t work and will end up falling apart.

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Loretta Lynch Lobs Love Bomb at Radical Islamic Terrorists Are compassion, unity, and love really America’s ‘most effective response to terror’? By Deroy Murdock

Posted By on June 28th, 2016

After meeting in Orlando, Fla., with law-enforcement officials investigating ISIS terrorist Omar Saddique Mateen’s June 12 massacre, Attorney General Loretta Lynch told journalists, “Our most effective response to terror and hatred is compassion, unity and love.”

After an interval of astonishment, Representative Jeff Duncan (R., S.C.) expressed his dismay at Lynch’s words.

“‘All you need is love’ may be a great Beatles song, but it’s a terrible foreign policy,” Duncan declared. “She further proves that this Administration has no idea what it takes to fight Islamic terrorism. She should resign immediately.”

Representative Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) also denounced Lynch’s olive branch.

“No, the most effective weapon against Islamic Extremism is not ‘love,’” Blackburn said. “It is a clear strategy to destroy ISIS.”

Duncan, Blackburn, and Lynch’s other critics really are being too harsh.

Like other brave leaders before her, Lynch merely was offering love as the most powerful weapon that ever can be wielded in the faces of tyrants and evil-doers. Lynch echoed the loving words of equally courageous and inspiring figures throughout history.

Who could forget the example of American Revolutionary Captain Nathan Hale of the Continental Army? Moments before British soldiers hanged him on Manhattan Island as a spy for General George Washington, Hale said on September 22, 1776, “I only regret that I have but one love to give for my country.”

Well, it worked! The British swam home in 1783, and America got busy becoming a country.

Two centuries later, and across the Atlantic, the existential threat from Adolf Hitler seemed almost insurmountable. Undeterred, Winston Churchill rallied the British people in June 1940 by urging them to lead with their hearts.

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Tutors: Girls May Be Made Too Upset by Microaggressions to Succeed on the SAT They’re just too overrun with emotion. By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on June 28th, 2016

Apparently, some tutors are concerned that an SAT math question with a chart showing more boys than girls in math classes may have made taking the test too difficult for females to handle emotionally.

According to an article in the New York Times, the content of the question is an example of what’s called a “stereotype threat.”

“When people are reminded during a test of a negative stereotype about their race or sex, psychologists say, it creates a kind of test anxiety that leads them to underperform,” the article explains.

According to the article, the question was one of two that some people in the test-prep industry felt fell into this category. The other one was a verbal question that included a historical passage from the 19th century that argued that a woman’s place was in the home.

Now, the article does admit that, according to the College Board, “No differences in the scores of boys and girls of comparable ability were found on the questions in dispute.”

So, what’s the problem? Well, according to the article, the issue isn’t really about scores on specific questions. Rather, the tutors are concerned that the very presence of “stereotype threat” questions may be a reason why males score better than females on the SAT in general.

POLITICS Comments turned off

DARRYL GLENN FOR SENATE IN COLORADO

Posted By on June 28th, 2016

Darryl Glenn Might Break Out in Today’s Colorado Senate Primary He is attracting attention from GOP luminaries. By Alexis Levinson

Three months ago, El Paso (Colo.) county commissioner Darryl Glenn had just over $11,000 in his Senate-campaign account. He had no paid staffers. And though he’d elevated his profile with a stem-winder of a speech at Colorado’s GOP convention and won his way onto the ballot — much to the surprise of many onlookers — as recently as mid May, most Republicans were still writing him off.

But that was then.

Though several Colorado Republicans describe the primary race as a “crapshoot,” many now expect Glenn to emerge victorious when primary ballots are tallied Tuesday evening. In the five-way primary, he has managed to capitalize on the fractured field thanks to a surge of support from movement conservatives, including an outside group that has made independent expenditures on his behalf.

Glenn, an Air Force Veteran and an African American, is vying for the GOP nomination to challenge Democratic senator Michael Bennet, one of Republicans’ only two realistic opportunities to pick up a Senate seat in November. It’s a race that has left Republicans shaking their heads for months. After multiple top recruits opted not to run, Republicans were left with five candidates who have little name recognition. No candidate has done anything to break out of the pack, and the paucity of public polling has left many Republicans unsure as to how it will ultimately turn out.

But that fractured field, in part, is what some Republicans say opened the door for Glenn. The lack of any one defined candidate, little interest from outside groups, and the fact that only one candidate has been spending significantly on television advertising in the final weeks, meant that an outside group willing to put some money in could have a big impact.

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A Long Trump Summer When have voters faced a choice between two such unpalatable, unprincipled candidates? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 28th, 2016

Before summer is over, we may see things now scarcely imagined that will make Brexit seem anticlimactic.

Trump’s Attack Mode

I think the following is an accurate statement: No major public figure has ever before attacked the Clintons in the manner that Donald Trump did last week. The details and tone of his charges can be endlessly analyzed, but their central theme resonates: The Clinton couple, broke when they left the White House in 2001, leveraged Hillary Clinton’s planned political trajectories to amass a personal fortune of between $100 and $200 million — all in the form of quid pro quo investments by wealthy individuals and foreign governments in the likely continuance of Clinton political power. Government is not the jungle of Manhattan real estate, and should have demanded at least a veneer of honesty.

The scandals of the Clinton Foundation, Bill Clinton’s various get-rich and jet-set escapades, and much of Hillary Clinton’s paranoia over the audit of her e-mail communications all revolve around a Clinton circle that can never be squared even by liberal pieties: The wealthy do not make politicians fabulously rich — unless they assume that they will receive something of much greater value in return.

The Clintons are unique — like no other first couple in recent American history. Not the Carters, not the Reagans, not the two Bush couples, not any first family emeritus has so unapologetically charged banks, foreign governments, corporations, and universities so much money for overtly so little, but on the expectation of clandestinely offering so much.

The Clinton ethical miasma is emblemized by the Laureate International Universities scandal — the highbrow version of Trump University, but a public not a private debacle. Between 2010 and 2015 “Chancellor” Bill Clinton was paid $16.5 million by the for-profit Laureate — but for what services he was to become one of the highest-paid university officials in history is not clear. Mirabile dictu, an educational affiliate of Laureate saw its support from the State Department more than triple from a pre-Clinton $15.1 million.

True, Hillary Clinton, who deleted over 30,000 of her private-server e-mails, can demand hard proof of such payola, but she still cannot rationalize why her husband was paid so much for so little demonstrable work, while she, after stepping down as the nation’s top diplomatic official, followed his reprehensible cue in her retirement.

Trump will continue to expand these charges, no doubt in his characteristic nihilist, take-no-prisoners fashion. Hillary is already replying in like kind, rather than in exalted “Have you no shame?” stature. But the rounds of fire between the two candidates are not quite symmetrical. Trump is brash, crude, and a brawler. Hillary is a carefully scripted and choreographed establishmentarian. Recently, speech coaches seem to have had some success in sedating her screech-owl, nails-on-the-chalkboard rants. She has seemed calmer, quieter, more deliberate.

But in response to Trump’s charges, Hillary is starting to resort to her naturally unpleasant side, both in form and in content. She should learn from Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. When Trump unloaded on them in turn, each eventually stooped to reply in like kind — and seemed suddenly unpresidential. Trump, of course, never claimed to be or perhaps could be completely presidential. But his establishment targets became less presidential once he scraped often their veneers and they climbed down into his muck.

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It’s as if the BBC wishes the world was falling apart: Charles Moore

Posted By on June 28th, 2016

“Is there any country in the world – apart from Britain – where the British Broadcasting Corporation would greet the return of parliamentary democracy with terror and dismay? ”

Funny how Project Fear has been even more strongly pushed by the BBC (and Channel 4 News) after Remain has lost. The poor public are encouraged to believe fantasies, such as that all Poles must now go home or that we shall need visas to visit France. Such tales cannot be authoritatively refuted because poor Messrs Cameron and Osborne dare not admit that most of what they told us the week before is rubbish, and the Leave campaign is not the government of the country.

Into this vacuum rush the doom-sayers. Yesterday the BBC put at the top of some bulletins the exclusive (“the BBC has learnt”) that HSBC will move 1,000 workers to Paris if Britain leaves the single market. The following things were not properly explained – that HSBC was contemplating this, not actually doing it; that we might not leave the single market anyway and certainly won’t for more than two years; that 1,000 workers is only just over two per cent of HSBC’s British workforce; and that most of those sent to Paris would probably be French people currently in London.

Is there any country in the world – apart from Britain – where the British Broadcasting Corporation would greet the return of parliamentary democracy with terror and dismay?

Despite the above, there is one person who should be deported at once. During the campaign, Ken Livingstone said that if Britain were to vote to leave the EU, he would leave Britain. When I last looked, he was still around. He should be put on a plane with a one-way ticket to Venezuela or Iran.

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After the vote, the implosion of the political class : Tim Black

Posted By on June 28th, 2016

The referendum exposed the chasm between politicians and people.

Until the EU referendum, the estrangement of Britain’s political class from vast swathes of the public had, for politicians and pundits alike, been the source of little more than low-level anxiety. Yes, that something is wrong had often been acknowledged. But no sooner had that acknowledgement taken place than the problem had been neatly packaged up as something it’s not, be it voter apathy or public disengagement or some other piece of policymaking jargonese.

But the referendum result has shattered the political class’s coping mechanisms. It can no longer pretend that voters aren’t sufficiently interested in politics, that, at some level, it’s our fault. Too many people turned out to vote for that to wash. No, the political class is now finally having to face up to its own reality as a ruling clique, infused with a paternalistic disdain for those it can no longer claim it represents. And faced by its own image, it is now imploding, sucking in, in one last desperate back-stab for salvation, party leaders, campaign managers and anyone else at whose feet blame can be laid.

And no wonder. Commentators have been talking about the disparity between the voting patterns in London and Scotland, which both overwhelmingly voted to remain, and the rest of the UK, which voted overwhelmingly to leave. But the real disparity is between the electorate and parliament. While 52 per cent of the British electorate supported leaving the EU, nearly 80 per cent of MPs supported staying in. That means that those putatively representing people, those claiming to voice their constituencies’ interests, are no longer doing that.

The mood of the political class, and those in the media who breathe in the same atmosphere, inhaling the same entitled, right-thinking fumes, was initially just shock, bewilderment, a palpable sense of ‘how on Earth could they do this?’. ‘This morning, I woke up in a country I do not recognise’, wrote one pundit. ‘After Thursday’, wrote another, ‘I feel like a foreigner in my own country  – that there’s this whole massive swathe of people out there who don’t think like me at all and probably don’t like me.’

Few actual politicians would risk admitting their distance and isolation in quite such stark, career-destroying terms. But the sentiment is there alright, in the passive-aggressive disappointment of Europhile Tories, and, more palpably, in the panicked resignation letters of Labour’s shadow ministers. So Steve Reed, shadow minister for local government, wrote: ‘A majority of Labour supporters in large parts of the north and midlands voted to leave the EU because their connection with our party has broken. We are losing touch with them…’ Anna Turley, shadow minister for civil society, echoed Reed, telling Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn that ‘it has been increasingly clear to me for some time that the leadership is not in touch with the hopes, the fears and the aspirations of my local constituents’. Quite.

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The Palestinian Authority’s Crackdown On Journalists by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on June 28th, 2016

According to his account, Abu Zeid was also subjected to shabah-style torture, where a detainee’s hands and feet are tied in painful positions while his head is covered with a bag. He said that one of the interrogators threw him to the floor and kicked him in sensitive parts of his lower body.

The interrogators also threatened to arrest Abu Zeid’s wife, a female colleague and his lawyer. That would have been the closest he would have gotten to the lawyer: in the 37 days of detention, Abu Zeid claimed that he was prevented from meeting with his lawyer or any representative of a human rights organization.

The report noted that the year 2015 witnessed a “deterioration” in human rights in the territories and described the situation there as “catastrophic on all levels — political, security and human rights.” The report pointed out that Palestinians, including journalists, were being arrested by the Palestinian Authority (PA) because of their work and postings on social media.

Ironically, this campaign by the PA against journalists, which has failed to draw the attention of the international community and mainstream media in the West, is designed to prevent the world from understanding that the PA is a dictatorship. So far, the plan is working.

On May 16, Palestinian Authority security officers raided the home of Palestinian journalist Tareq Abu Zeid in the West Bank city of Nablus. After ransacking the house, the officers confiscated a computer and mobile phone before taking Abu Zeid into custody.

Abu Zeid, 40, who works for the Al-Aqsa TV channel, which is affiliated with Hamas, was held in detention for 37 days at the notorious Palestinian Authority-controlled Jneid Prison in Nablus.

On June 22, a Palestinian court in Nablus ordered the release of the journalist on a 5,000 Jordanian dinar (about $8,000) bail. The same court had ordered Abu Zeid remanded into custody three times during his detention. The court had turned down seven petitions demanding the release of the journalist during his incarceration.

No charges have been filed against Abu Zeid, who is originally from the West Bank city of Jenin. It is also highly unlikely that he will ever stand trial.

Palestinian security sources said he was suspected of “publishing news that harms the public interest and fomenting strife” among Palestinians. Although the sources did not provide further details, it is believed that Abu Zeid was accused of publishing stories that reflected negatively on the Palestinian Authority and its leaders. In other words, the journalist failed to serve as a mouthpiece for the Palestinian Authority and its leaders.

Abu Zeid is not the first Palestinian journalist to be targeted by the PA. Such arrests have become commonplace under the Palestinian Authority. But now it seems that the Palestinian Authority has moved from the phase of intimidation to torture.