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Flemming Rose: A Portrait in Courage A Danish journalist stands up to attempts to suppress unpopular opinions. By Michael Tanner ****

Posted By on May 25th, 2016

Both around the world and here at home, free speech is under assault. From the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris to the “unexplained” deaths of critics of Russian president Vladimir Putin, people who express unpopular opinions or report the truth are in danger. Worldwide, more than 110 journalists were killed in 2015, bringing the total to 787 since 2005, according to Reporters without Borders.

The threats to free speech in this country don’t rise to that level, of course. But Hillary Clinton wants to change the First Amendment to limit political speech, and Donald Trump wants to rewrite libel laws so that he can sue media critics. Meanwhile, colleges routinely punish those who take unpopular stands and reject speakers who might challenge student orthodoxy.

That’s one reason why it is significant that the Cato Institute will award the eighth biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to a true champion of free speech, the Danish journalist and author Flemming Rose.

Rose came to the world’s attention in 2005, when, as an editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, he published a series of twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Rose did so, not because he sought to be offensive, he said, but to challenge the growing wave of “self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam.”

Rose’s decision to publish the cartoons sparked riots in Europe and across the Islamic world. A price was put on Rose’s head, and he has received numerous credible death threats. A plot to assassinate him was disrupted by the FBI in 2009. Still, he firmly rejects the idea, so prevalent these days, that “you have a right not to be insulted or offended.”

While he came to prominence as a result of the Muhammad cartoons, Rose is not a provocateur but a defender of free speech as a matter of principle. In fact, he has recently undertaken a new cause: standing up for Muslims targeted by some of Europe’s new anti-terror laws, and fighting restrictions on religious speech deemed “extreme” by authorities. He has condemned Dutch politician Geert Wilders’s call to ban the Quran.

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Thanks to Obama, the terrorist cancer is growing Mark Thiessen

Posted By on May 25th, 2016

We still do not know who or what is responsible for the crash of EgyptAir Flight 804, but we know this much for certain: The terrorist danger is growing, and it won’t be contained to the Mediterranean.

Responding to criticism of President Obama’s handling of terrorism, White House press secretary Josh Earnest boasted Thursday of all the setbacks the Islamic State has experienced in recent months, noting that in Iraq “45 percent of the populated area that ISIL previously controlled has been retaken from them. In Syria, that figure is now 20 percent.”

That’s like a patient who ignored a cancer diagnosis bragging that he finally reduced the tumor in his lung — glossing over the fact that he let it spread and metastasize to his other organs. If he had attacked the Islamic State cancer early, Obama could have stopped it from spreading in the first place. But instead, he dismissed the terrorist group as the “JV team” that was “engaged in various local power struggles and disputes” and did not have “the capacity and reach of a bin Laden” and did not pose “a direct threat to us.” He did nothing, while the cancer grew in Syria and then spread in Iraq.

Now the cancer has spread and metastasized across the world.

According to a recent CNN analysis, since declaring its caliphate in 2014, the Islamic State has carried out 90 attacks in 21 countries outside of Iraq and Syria that have killed 1,390 people and injured more than 2,000 others. The Islamic State has a presence in more than a dozen countries and has declared “provinces” in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Post reported in 2015 that “since the withdrawal of most U.S. and international troops in December, the Islamic State has steadily made inroads in Afghanistan” where it has “poured pepper into the wounds of their enemies . . . seared their hands in vats of boiling oil . . . blindfolded, tortured and blown apart [villagers] with explosives buried underneath them.”

On the day an EgyptAir plane carrying 66 people disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea, White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that investigators will look into all “potential factors that may have contributed to this tragedy.” (White House)

And while the Islamic State spreads and grows, al-Qaeda is making a comeback. Obama is touting the killing of Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour as “an important milestone,” but the truth is that the Taliban has made major military gains in Afghanistan — and that has opened the door to al-Qaeda. The Post reported in October that “American airstrikes targeted what was ‘probably the largest’ al-Qaeda training camp found in the 14-year Afghan war.” Sounds good except for one small problem: There were no major al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan when Obama took office. Now it is once again training terrorists in the land where it trained operatives for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

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Oberlin Students: Replace Midterms with Conversations and Erase Grades Below Cs Very reasonable. By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on May 25th, 2016

Student activists at Oberlin College are saying how frustrated they are that the school is making it so tough for them to be on campus — and that it’s so unfair that the school won’t heed their demands for how to make it easier on them.

Now, in case you forgot, Oberlin made headlines in December when student activists started demanding $8.20 per hour for protesting. That was pretty ridiculous in itself, but interviews with student activists in a New Yorker piece written by Nathan Heller suggest that that demand was really just the tip of the ridiculousness iceberg. For example, a self-identified “Afro-Latinx” student named Megan Bautista said she was upset that the school is refusing to erase any grades below Cs:

Oberlin had modified its grading standards to accommodate activism around the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings, and Bautista had hoped for something similar. More than thirteen hundred students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester, but to no avail. “Students felt really unsupported in their endeavors to engage with the world outside Oberlin,” she told me.

Whoa. So, is she trying to say that under the current policy, if you earn a D then a D appears on your transcript? Yikes, that is insane! Totally unfair! How do kids even handle going there?

I’m being sarcastic, of course . . . but believe it or not, some students actually believe this to be unfair. A transgender student named Cyrus Eosphoros — an activist who had advocated putting trigger warnings on Antigone – told the New Yorker he had just dropped out because of what Heller said he’d described as a “want of institutional support.”

“There’s this persistent, low-grade dehumanization from everyone,” Eosphoros said.

This sentiment of feeling dehumanized and mistreated was echoed by many others — including a student from Chicago named Zakiya Acey, who thought it was like, totally an injustice that some of his professors made him actually take his midterms instead of allowing him to just chat with them about the subject material instead:

“There’s professors who have openly been, like, ‘Yeah, instead of, you know, writing out this midterm, come into my office hours, and you can just speak it,’ right? But that’s not institutionalized,” he said. “I have to find that professor.”

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Commencement Season The two most popular toxic themes being promoted to new graduates. Thomas Sowell

Posted By on May 25th, 2016

This is the season of college Commencement speeches — an art form that has seldom been memorable, but has increasingly become toxic in recent times.

Two themes seem to dominate Commencement speeches. One is shameless self-advertising by people in government, or in related organizations supported by the taxpayers or donors, saying how nobler it is to be in “public service” than working in business or other “selfish” activities.

In other words, the message is that it is morally superior to be in organizations consuming output produced by others than to be in organizations which produce that output. Moreover, being morally one-up is where it’s at.

The second theme of many Commencement speakers, besides flattering themselves that they are in morally superior careers, is to flatter the graduates that they are now equipped to go out into the world as “leaders” who can prescribe how other people should live.

In other words, young people, who in most cases have never had either the sobering responsibility and experience of being self-supporting adults, are to tell other people — who have had that responsibility and that experience for years — how they should live their lives.

In so far as the graduates go into “public service” in government, whether as bureaucrats or as aides to politicians or judges, they are to help order other people around.

It might never occur to many Commencement speakers, or to their audiences, that what the speakers are suggesting is that inexperienced young graduates are to prescribe, or help to dictate, to vast numbers of other people who have the real world experience that the graduates themselves lack.

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The Muslim World is a Permanent Refugee Crisis It’s never going to stop unless we shut the door. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 25th, 2016

Forget the Syrian Civil War for a moment. Even without the Sunnis and Shiites competing to give each other machete haircuts every sunny morning, there would still be a permanent Muslim refugee crisis.

The vast majority of civil wars over the last ten years have taken place in Muslim countries. Muslim countries are also some of the poorest in the world. And Muslim countries also have high birth rates.

Combine violence and poverty with a population boom and you get a permanent migration crisis.

No matter what happens in Syria or Libya next year, that permanent migration crisis isn’t going away.

The Muslim world is expanding unsustainably. In the Middle East and Asia, Muslims tend to underperform their non-Muslim neighbors both educationally and economically. Oil is the only asset that gave Muslims any advantage and in the age of fracking, its value is a lot shakier than it used to be.

The Muslim world had lost its old role as the intermediary between Asia and the West. And it has no economic function in the new world except to blackmail it by spreading violence and instability.

Muslim countries with lower literacy rates, especially for women, are never going to be economic winners at any trade that doesn’t come gushing out of the ground. Nor will unstable dictatorships ever be able to provide social mobility or access to the good life. At best they’ll hand out subsidies for bread.

The Muslim world has no prospects for getting any better. The Arab Spring was a Western delusion.

Growing populations divided along tribal and religious lines are competing for a limited amount of land, power and wealth. Countries without a future are set to double in size.

There are only two solutions; war or migration.

Either you fight and take what you want at home. Or you go abroad and take what you want there.

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“I Love Israel … Free People Need to Unify against Islam as a Belief System”: Son of Hamas leader (video)

Posted By on May 25th, 2016

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

At the Jerusalem Post Annual Conference Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a prominent Hamas commander, pays warm tribute to Israel as “the only light in the Middle East”, condemns BDS, the “apartheid” slur, and the political correctness that muzzles expressions of fear regarding Islam (“the Muslim people have a problem”), and issues a stark warning that the danger from Islam endangers the whole world, not just Israel.

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Freddie Gray and Jihad: Narrative v. Fact By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on May 25th, 2016

I’ve been fortunate to have had two professional careers, the first one in the courtroom as a trial lawyer and the second in journalism. I did not need the latter experience, though, to notice the stark difference between these two worlds.

When I prosecuted the “Blind Sheikh” (Omar Abdel Rahman) and the jihadist cell that bombed the World Trade Center and then plotted a simultaneous attack on several New York City landmarks, the organs of government that speak to the public through the media were making like irresponsible journalists. That is, they were eschewing facts and evidence, obsessively peddling a counterfactual narrative, to wit:

There is only one “true” Islam, and it is resolutely peaceful (indeed, being a “religion of peace” is apparently its only identifiable attribute). Therefore, the terrorist acts plotted and committed by a cabal of men who just happened to be Muslim had utterly nothing to do with Islam, notwithstanding the jihadists’ proclamations to the contrary.

By contrast, in the courtroom, criminal allegations cannot be proved absent convincing factual evidence — beyond a reasonable doubt — that unanimously persuades jurors of the suspects’ guilt.

Thus, though we prosecutors were formally part of the government, it was as if we were inhabiting a cocoon insulated from the fictional government narrative. Indeed, the judge repeatedly reminded the jurors of their oath to decide the case solely based on the facts proved and the controlling law, not bias, fear or favor — which was a 1990s way of saying “not narrative.”

The upshot of all this? No matter what “religion of peace” blather was coming out of Main Justice in Washington or the White House press apparatus, in our New York City federal courtroom a short distance from the Twin Towers, we were not only permitted but obliged as government attorneys to prove the truth:

(a) There are mainstream interpretations of Islam that endorse war against non-Muslims to establish Allah’s law (sharia);

(b) these are literalist interpretations that draw directly on Islamic scripture;

(c) the interpretations (Salafism, Wahhabism, Islamic supremacism — collectively, what we hopefully refer to as “radical” Islam) are urged on young Muslims (mostly men) by influential sharia scholars like the Blind Sheikh, whose powerful influence owes solely and only to their mastery of the doctrine;

(d) based on those incitements, these young men are radicalized into jihadism, plotting and committing acts of terrorism.

Those were the facts. Our evidence proved them incontestably. That is the only way we were able to convict jihadists — not only in my prosecution, but in case after terrorism case.

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Palestinians and Jordan: Will a Confederation Work? by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on May 25th, 2016

“Jordan is not the only Arab country that does not consider the Palestinians trustworthy partners. The Jordanians still have painful memories from the early 1970s, when the PLO and other Palestinian groups tried to establish a state within a state inside the kingdom, and thus threatened Jordan’s security and stability. Today, there is only one solution: maintain the status quo until Palestinian leaders wake up and start working to improve the living conditions of their people and prepare them for peace with Israel.”

In a rare moment of truth, former Jordanian Prime Minister Abdel Salam Majali admitted that the Palestinians were not “fully qualified to assume their responsibilities, especially in the financial field, in wake of the failure of the Arab countries to support them.”

According to the study, the Jordanian public is totally opposed to the idea of confederation, even after the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. The Jordanians fear, among other things, that the confederation would lead to the “dilution” of the Jordanian identity, create instability and undermine security in the kingdom.

The reality on the ground is that the two-state solution has already been fulfilled: in the end, the Palestinians got two mini-states of their own – one governed by the Palestinian Authority and the second by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Today, there is only one solution: maintain the status quo until Palestinian leaders wake up and start working to improve the living conditions of their people and prepare them for peace with Israel.

Talk about a confederation between the Palestinians and Jordan has once again resurfaced, this time after a series of unofficial meetings in Amman and the West Bank in the past few weeks. Jordan, fearing that such confederation would end up with the Hashemite kingdom transformed into a Palestinian state, is not currently keen on the idea.

Many Palestinians have also expressed reservations about the idea. They argue that a confederation could harm their effort to establish an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

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“Radical” vs. “Moderate” Islam: A Muslim View by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on May 25th, 2016

According to Dr. Ahmed Ibrahim Khadr, the first loyalty of radicals is to Islam while the first loyalty for moderates, regardless of their religion, is to the state. Radicals reject the idea of religious equality because Allah’s true religion is Islam; moderates accept it.

Radicals, Khadr charges, also marvel that the moderate “finds hatred for non-Muslims unacceptable.”

If true — and disturbing polls certainly indicate that Khadr’s findings are prevalent — the West may need to rethink one of its main means of countering radical Islam: moderate Muslims and moderate Islam.

After his recent electoral victory, it emerged that Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, had described moderate Muslim groups as “Uncle Toms” — a racial slur used against blacks perceived to be subservient to whites, or, in this context, Muslims who embrace “moderate Islam” as, in his view, a way of being subservient to the West.

One of Iran’s highest clerics apparently shares the same convictions. After asserting that “revolutionary Islam is the same as pure Muhammadan Islam,” Ayatollah Tabatabaeinejad recently said:

“Some say our Islam is not revolutionary Islam, but we must say to them that non-revolutionary Islam is the same as American Islam. Islam commands us to be firm against the enemies and be kind and compassionate toward each other and not be afraid of anything…”

According to the AB News Agency,

“Ayatollah Tabatabaeinejad stated that revolutionary Islam is this same Islam. It is the Islam that is within us that can create changes. The warriors realized that Islam is not just prayers and fasting, but rather they stood against the enemies in support of Islam.”

How many Muslims share these convictions, one from a Sunni living (and now governing) in London, the other from a Shia living and governing in the Middle East?

According to an Arabic language article, (in translation) “The Truth about the Moderate Muslim as Seen by the West and its Muslim Followers,” by Dr. Ahmed Ibrahim Khadr in 2011:

“Islamic researchers are agreed that what the West and its followers call ‘moderate Islam’ and ‘moderate Muslims’ is simply a slur against Islam and Muslims, a distortion of Islam, a rift among Muslims, a spark to ignite war among them. They also see that the division of Islam into ‘moderate Islam’ and ‘radical Islam’ has no basis in Islam — neither in its doctrines and rulings, nor in its understandings or reality.

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FBI investigation of McAuliffe leaked: why? By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on May 25th, 2016

The stunning news that the FBI has been investigating Virginia Governor (and key Clinton Machine operative) Terry McAuliffe for a year is widely seen as an ominous sign for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But a lot of tealeaf reading is necessary to figure out what is really going on.

CNN obtained the scoop:

Virginia Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the FBI and prosecutors from the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, U.S. officials briefed on the probe say.

The investigation dates to at least last year and has focused, at least in part, on whether donations to his gubernatorial campaign violated the law, the officials said. (snip)

As part of the probe, the officials said, investigators have scrutinized McAuliffe’s time as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, a vehicle of the charitable foundation set up by former President Bill Clinton.

Now who might those “US officials briefed on the probe” be? People with political motives to leak this news. Four basic alternatives suggest themselves:

Someone who wants to damage the Hillary Clinton campaign and is anxious to open a new front in the public controversies over her political machine, including the Clinton Foundation.
Someone anxious to demonstrate that the ongoing FBI probe is serious, and that the Justice Department will not take a dive on pursuing the issues beyond the negligent handling of classified material.
Someone who wants to crate pressure on the Justice Department to act on whatever FBI referrals may be coming.
Someone wants to warn McAuliffe and his associates that they are under scrutiny.

None of these alternatives is good news for the Clinton Machine.