U.S. Ties Bring No Quick Relief to Cuba’s Dissidents As Obama prepares to arrive in Havana on Monday, dissidents say repression by Raúl Castro’s government hasn’t let up for those daring to speak out By Sara Schaefer Muñoz

HAVANA, Cuba—About 30 antigovernment protesters gathered at this city’s Mahatma Gandhi Park on Sunday and unfurled a banner in anticipation of President Barack Obama’s groundbreaking visit next week. “Obama, Cuba has a dream,” it read. “Cuba without Castros.”

They were soon surrounded by an angry crowd, followed by Cuban security officers who tore the banner from their hands, hustled them into police cars and took them away.

Some arrested demonstrators said they were kicked, hit, pushed to the ground and stripped naked before being released hours later. Their treatment was part of a more general crackdown on dissidents as the U.S. president prepares to arrive in Havana on Monday.

‘The Cuban government keeps trying to stop us, to demonize us, and we all live in fear.’
—Berta Soler of the dissident group Ladies in White

Since the U.S. began normalizing relations with its long-standing political foe in December 2014, tourism here has flourished, making central Havana bustle with new restaurants, hotels and gift shops. But in crumbling neighborhoods outside the elegant tourist areas, residents say the repression by President Raúl Castro’s government hasn’t let up for those daring to speak out.

“Here in Cuba nothing has changed,” said Berta Soler, a member of a dissident group calling itself the Ladies in White, moments before she was arrested with those carrying the banner. “The Cuban government keeps trying to stop us, to demonize us, and we all live in fear.”

Ladies in White, whose members wear white to symbolize peace, are among the dissidents targeted in a wave of arrests around the island in recent days, say human-rights activists here and abroad. That comes in part because the dissidents have stepped up their activities as they strive to be noticed ahead of Mr. Obama’s visit. CONTINUE AT SITE

A Guide to Disinvitation: My Conversation with Williams College President Adam Falk by Peter Wood

On February 18, Adam Falk, president of Williams College, sent an email to the Williams community announcing “the extraordinary step” he was taking by “cancelling a speech by John Derbyshire.” The email was sent on a Thursday, cancelling an event that had been scheduled for the following Monday. I have corresponded with President Falk about his decision, and with his permission, I will present his full, unedited answer.
You can skip to that below, but I hope you will stay with me as I review the broader situation.

A DISINVITED DECADE
The Derbyshire disinvitation was, of course, only one more in a growing list of disinvitations on college campuses, as well as other snubs, actions prompting invited speakers to cancel their own appearances, and speakers showing up only to be drowned out by protesters. In 2014, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) published a “List of Campus Disinvitation Attempts, 2000-2014,” which captured nearly 200 cases. That was before George Will was disinvited by Scripps College in October 2014, and before Suzanne Venker was disinvited from Williams College in October 2015. Venker is the author of several anti-feminist books and a frequent guest on Fox News programs.
As it happens, Venker wasn’t disinvited by President Falk. Her red card came from the students who originally invited her. They disinvited her after they came under intense pressure from fellow students. President Falk at the time defended Venker’s right to speak. In a column (“How to Disagree”) in the student newspaper he wrote, “Whatever our own views may be, we should be active in bringing to campus speakers whose opinions are different from our own.”

The campus disinvitation phenomenon has been widely discussed—and deplored. It represents a failure on the part of colleges and universities to uphold the cardinal principles of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression. Cry-bully students and Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists primed to take “offense” at anything that troubles them; faculty members frantically eager to engage in virtue signaling; and college presidents determined to stay ahead of the wave of political correctness have contributed to this odd form of censorship.
The beginnings of campus protest are often traced to Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964-1965. As though the protesters had set out to prove Hegel right, the movement gave birth to its own antithesis fifty years later: a movement that flat out rejects the ideals of free expression in favor of “safe spaces.” The distance between FSM and BLM turns out to be much smaller than anyone could have dreamed.

CHANGING SCRIPPS
Among the members of the National Association of Scholars are many who view the disinvitations as a singularly bad development. I share some of that outrage, but the task of NAS is to seek to repair American higher education, and merely declaring that a college here or a university there has behaved in an egregious way does limited good. In the case of the decision by Lori Bettison-Varga, president of Scripps College, disinviting George Will, I wrote her a letter urging her to reconsider. I wrote separately to the Scripps board of trustees and yet again to the editors of the student newspaper. Rather disconcertingly, President Bettison-Varga did not reply, nor did any trustee, any representative of the trustees, or any student editor.

The decisions by all involved to ignore my letters is, I believe, part of the larger phenomenon. Not answering a letter is another way of closing the door on the exchange of ideas. It is a less visible form of silencing but important in its own way. In 1987, when I went to work in the John Silber administration at Boston University, one of my first tasks was to answer the letters of complaint that were part of an organized campaign. The hundreds of letters stemmed from the non-reappointment of a faculty member who had a base of support outside the university. Answering them was not a matter of sending the same canned response to everyone. My instructions were to take each letter on its merits and explain as fully as needed the university’s position.

The Stiff Price of Social Justice By “Adam Mission”

Adam Mission is the pseudonym of someone who works in the admissions office of a well-known public research university.

“As you might expect, her father and I are concerned with the financials,” she said, “We’ve been diligent about saving through a 529 plan. Despite this, our shortfall would still be in the $70,000 range.”
The applicant’s parents sat across from my desk in the admission department. They seemed sheepish that they didn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting in their account. I could tell from the moment they walked into my office that this was their first child going to college.
“Frankly, we’re old school,” the mother continued, “Besides our mortgage, we’ve never had any debt, lived within our means and saved for the future. We hope for our child to graduate with as little debt as possible.”
She paused, and finally straightened as if to brace for what she was going to say next.
“We’re both from humble, hardworking Midwest households and we’ve earned every penny we have. We’re even prepared to move here if it means getting our daughter in-state tuition.”
Her story wasn’t unusual. In fact, the high cost of college tuition is one of the most common things I deal with as an admissions counselor for a well-known public research university. College tuition is outrageously high; and it’s only getting higher every year. When my father went to college, tuition at my current institution was around $300 a year. Even accounting for inflation, the average American family a generation ago could afford going to college without breaking the bank. Now tuition at my university is 30 times as expensive. Students and their families pay for college by taking on second mortgages, working four jobs, or moving to another state. Most often they take on crippling debt that will haunt them the rest of their life.
There are a lot of theories about why the cost of tuition is so high and just as many about how to get those costs under control. Politicians, unsurprisingly, promise increased federal funding to make it “free.” Academics criticize the increased expenditure on massive collegiate athletic programs. All sorts of people disapprove of uncontrolled spending on expansive building projects and the all-inclusive resort amenities that students now seem to expect at college. What really costs money, though, is salaries. As with most businesses, the highest expenditure of a university is payroll—and that cost has been skyrocketing. The reason is the growth in administrative jobs. In the past 25 years, the number of non-academic administrative employees has doubled nationwide, growing at more than double the rate of increase in the number of students.

“Muslim Jerusalem”: Turkey’s Message of “Peace” to Israel by Uzay Bulut

Turkey’s attempts at “normalizing relations with Israel” apparently do not actually aim to normalize the relations.

“We do not forget Gaza and Palestine even in our dreams, let alone in negotiations. … Whatever is wrong for Palestine is also wrong for us. We discussed these issues in detail during our meetings with my dear friend, Khaled Mashaal [leader of Hamas]. This is the main objective behind the talks of normalizing ties with Israel.” – Ahmet Davutoglu, Prime Minister of Turkey.

Do Turkish government representatives also tell their Israeli colleagues that Khaled Mashaal is their “dear friend”? Do they also divulge that the only aim of the negotiations is to get compensation for the Mavi Marmara incident and to remove the “blockade” on Gaza, possibly again so that weapons to be used against Israel can come in?

Turkey’s attempts at “normalizing relations with Israel” apparently do not actually aim to normalize the relations.

As often happens in the Middle East, there are two sound-tracks going on — one perhaps in English to Israel, and one in Turkish to Turkey’s citizens. Both sound-tracks cannot be right.

On July 1, 2010, Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu addressed his parliament:

“Jerusalem is our issue. Contrary to what you assume, it is not a territory of Israel. According to the international law, East Jerusalem is a part of the state of Palestine and is one of the territories under occupation. Al-Aqsa Mosque is in East Jerusalem, too. Al-Aqsa Mosque is not Israeli territory and will not be. If peace happens one day, — and that is what I mean — East Jerusalem will be the capital of Palestine and a meeting of the Arab league will be held there, as well. We are giving a message of peace here. Yes, there will be peace and East Jerusalem will be the capital of Palestine.”

YOUMERICA BY DANIEL GREENFIELD

The paradox of the individualistic society is that it can only exist if individuals embrace virtues that are greater than their own needs and whims. A society where each individual acts as a little tyrant, pursuing his desires with total selfishness at the expense of everyone else becomes collectivist as the little tyrants turn to a series of big tyrants to get what they want no matter who gets hurt by it.

Social compacts are the alternative to big government. Communities built around unwritten laws in which people do the right thing keep government at bay better than a million laws ever could. No Constitution can protect a people that does not know or care about what it says. Laws embody ideas about what a society can be. But only the people can actually live out those ideas in their lives.

As individual virtues and social compacts break down, selfish squabbles escalate. Tribalism turns into legal civil war. Laws become the means by which one group imposes its will on the other and by which one man seizes the property of another. The people come to view the system with contempt. All virtues and principles are abandoned as neighbor turns on neighbor in resentment and hatred.

Our society has cultivated narcissism as its highest virtue. Even liberalism has become condensed to an identity politics of narcissism in which each victim gets to talk about their feelings for fifteen minutes before crybullying for someone’s head. Political discourse has become an exchange of feelings. And unlike contradictory ideas, clashing feelings of entitlement cannot be resolved.

Ideas can exist objectively. Feelings only exist subjectively. Identity politics resolves this problem by treating the objective response to feelings as privilege. But even subjective empathy can never truly approach the subjective experience of the crybully. Even a member of that same identity group will differ in some way from the multiple intersectional identities of the crybully. And that difference is its own privilege. This isn’t really politics. It’s self-help narcissism crossbred with stale Marxism.

Marxism pretended to be a science. Its idiot inheritors use the same highly specialized vocabulary to describe their imaginary science of feelings to decide whose feelings get hurt microscopically worse.

But that’s the only kind of politics that narcissists can be expected to embrace. The left has personalized the political as much as it has politicized the personal. Its politics is purely personal. Its ideas can be condensed to “X upsets Y”. With the corollary that in the future X will not be allowed to upset Y because Y will be in charge of everything and stupid people like X will all die off so that history is on the side of Y and not X. This is a seven year old’s politics with better vocabulary.

Trump’s Pro-Russian Policy Threatens Israel By Cliff Kincaid

Donald J. Trump has received the endorsements of conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Something doesn’t make sense here.

Schlafly has always been a realist on the matter of the aggressive foreign policy of the old Soviet Union and now Russia. On the other hand, as noted [1] by Josh Rogin at Bloomberg View, Trump has a “pro-Russian foreign policy” that could have something to do with the businessman’s history of trying to do business in Russia.

Trump is threatening riots if he doesn’t get the Republican nomination. But rank-and-file conservatives who make up the Republican Party could themselves protest if Trump walks out of the Cleveland convention with the nomination. Indeed, they could walk out on Trump and back a third party conservative candidate. It’s not just Trump’s pro-Russian views. It’s how his support for Russia and Putin threatens Israel.

The Forward has run an article [2] claiming that Trump has the strongest Jewish ties of all the GOP candidates. He has raised money for Jewish causes and members of his family are Jewish. But none of this can justify his support for Putin’s Russia. It is Russia that is backing Israel’s enemies in the region, most notably Iran.

Trump can’t have it both ways by supporting Russia while attacking Iran. The two regimes are engaged in a military alliance.

Kerry Pirouettes Halfway Out on a Limb About ISIS and Genocide By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Kerry is willing to list the ways in which ISIS is horrific and to say HE THINKS it is committing genocide, but unwilling to definitively say it is.

In a statement on Wednesday, March 17, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry went halfway out on a limb and announced that ‘in his judgment,’ ISIS is committing genocide against Yezidis and Christians and Shia Muslims and other living things.

But –fair minded man that he is — Kerry refused to say definitively that ISIS actually is committing genocide. Such a definitive statement, Kerry insisted, could only be made by an international court.

Once upon a time, our world had people — they were called “leaders” — who were not afraid to name evil, and condemn evil when they saw it. Can you imagine Churchill or Roosevelt issuing a statement that, in their opinion, the Nazis were evil, but that any definitive conclusion on the subject would have to be issued by someone else?

So if you see other reports about Kerry’s statement today, you may find headlines saying the U.S. has announced that ISIS is committing genocide. Sadly, though, Kerry did not quite say that. He said ISIS (he now calls it Daesh, its Arabic acronym) is doing lots of terrible things that the U.S. and its coalition partners detest and want to stop.

Kerry mentioned, at the outset, the taking over of major cities and seizing of territory in Syria and Iraq, committed by ISIS over the past two years. He mentioned that ISIS has overrun major cities, seized territory in Syria and Iraq.

Those are not the first things most humanitarians would list, when listing the atrocities which ISIS has committed.

Kerry then boasted about the U.S. efforts, that it “responded quickly by denouncing these horrific acts and – more importantly – taking coordinated actions to counter them.” He mentioned the international coalition which is working “to halt and reverse Daesh’s momentum.” And ticks off the coalition’s successes and actions.

Jamie Glazov Video: The Media’s Willful Blindness about Islam.

As the dire threat of Islamic Jihad continues to escalate on our own soil, we continue to witness mass denial within the West’s leadership, media and culture about the Islamic nature of Islamic terror. Just recently in Canada, for instance, a Muslim male, Ayanle Hassan Ali, walked into a Canadian Forces office in north Toronto and attacked several soldiers with a large knife, screaming “Allah told me to do this. Allah told me to come here and kill people!” while he was stabbing the soldiers.

Authorities are still searching for a motive of why Ayanle Hassan Ali engaged in this attack. Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders has made it clear, meanwhile, that the highest priority must be to avoid “Islamophobia” in reaction to Ali stabbing Canadian soldiers and screaming Allah’s name while doing so.

In response to this latest denial on the Islamic nature of Islamic Jihad, we are running Jamie Glazov’s speech at the Eagle Forum of California State Conference in 2015. He tackled The Media’s Willful Blindness about Islam, unveiling the hazardous danger of the West deceiving itself about Islamic Jihad.

Don’t miss it!

The high cost of the lies we tell ourselves.

To watch the video, CLICK HERE.http://jamieglazov.com/2016/03/17/jamie-glazov-video-the-medias-willful-blindness-about-islam/

Argentinian President Says of 1994 Jewish Center Bombing: ‘Everything That Happened Made Us Look Weak in the World’ by Ruthie Blum

“Everything that happened made us look weak in the world,” Argentinian President Mauricio Macri said in an interview with AP on Thursday, the 24th anniversary of the Israeli Embassy bombing in Buenos Aires, which came two years before the attack on the city’s Jewish center. “But now we are determined to bring what happened to light.”

Macri, who has reached the 100-day mark of his administration –characterized by its total about-face in relation to the policies of the previous government, led by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — was referring to an investigation surrounding a case that rocked Argentina and garnered international notoriety.

The case in question is the death of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who was found shot dead in his apartment last year. Though police surmised it was a suicide, it occurred mere hours before Nisman was to provide evidence to back up his accusation that Kirchner had been in cahoots with Tehran in its attempt to deny involvement in the 1994 car-bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish center, which left 85 people dead and hundreds more wounded.

Earlier this month, as The Algemeiner reported, Antonio Stiuso, former operations chief of Argentina’s spy agency, was questioned in a closed-door hearing about his relationship with Nisman and the days leading up to the latter’s January 18, 2015 death. Stiuso had been helping Nisman with the investigation into the bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), believed to have been carried out by Hezbollah with Iran’s backing.

Stiuso’s arrival from abroad, where he fled in April 2014 amid claims he was receiving death threats, came on the heels of another development — the publicly stated belief of a top prosecutor that Nisman’s death was a homicide, the first such declaration on the part of a judicial official in Argentina.

Latin American, Caribbean Lawmakers Sign Pro-Israel, Anti-BDS Resolution

JNS.org – Parliamentarians from 13 Latin American and Caribbean nations have signed a resolution in support of Israel and against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The lawmakers met last week in Miami for the the Israel Allies Foundation’s Second Annual Latin America Summit on Israel, according to a document obtained by the Jerusalem Post.

The resolution, written in Spanish, states that the signatories “unequivocally declare, personally, our support for the Jewish people to live in peace, safety and security in the Land of Israel” and that “strong relations between the Western Hemisphere and Israel are crucial to the spread of freedom, democracy and justice around the world.”

“Boycotts and sanctions against the State of Israel and its products contribute to an antisemitic attitude inspired by antisemitism and opposition to the Jewish State…[and] are detrimental to a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and must be rejected by all actors that seek peace,” it also states.

The resolution also affirms that “the eventual existence of countries with nuclear weapons in the Middle East poses and existential threat to Israel and for peace around the world.”