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CAROLINE GLICK: COORDINATED ASSAULT

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

“I’m proud of him.”

That’s what the father of Dafna Meir’s murderer said when the Palestinian media asked him what he thinks of his cold-blooded son Murad Adais.

On Sunday afternoon, Adais butchered Meir in her home, in front of her children.

Whether Adais Sr. is really happy that his son will rot in prison is less important than the fact that he said what he said to his home crowd.

He knows that his audience thinks his son is a hero. And so he played to his audience.

Since last September when the Palestinians began their current terrorist onslaught, killers like Adais have been characterized as lone wolves. But a study published last November in Mosaic online journal by Shalem College’s Daniel Polisar shows that this characterization is both wrong and unhelpful.

Polisar studied Palestinian public opinion data from surveys conducted by four independent research groups over the past 25 years. His data exposed three key aspects to Palestinian positions about Israel that all bear directly on the current Palestinian terrorist offensive.

His first finding is that throughout most of the past quarter-century a solid majority of Palestinians have supported terrorism against Israelis.

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First Do No Harm By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

The premier rule governing those who practice medicine is apparently not applicable to reporters for the New York Times. Sharon Otterman has the byline for an article detailing the arrest of David H. Newman, distinguished Mt. Sinai physician and author, on charges of sexually abusing two patients in the emergency room at different times.(”Colleagues Express Disbelief Over Arrest of Doctor with Picture-Perfect Life,” NYT 1/21) The reporter goes on to give the dates and circumstances of each patient’s story, one having occurred on Jan 12 and one elicited by a patient after hearing news of that event; her experience occurred the previous Sept. The Times article differs from all other coverage of this story in that Ms. Otterman felt it necessary to mention the full name of Dr. Newman’s wife, a practicing physician herself. She also felt the need to describe the house where the two live with their children as well as the town where it is located.

Needless to say, Dr. Newman has not been tried or convicted yet so we are not reading about a man guilty of the crime for which he has been arrested. We are possibly reading about an innocent man, wrongfully accused by a woman under the influence of morphine. The names of the two purported victims are withheld out of respect for their privacy. Why isn’t Dr. Newman’s wife afforded equal respect, both by Sharon Otterman and the Times editor who reviewed her article before publication?

In googling Ms. Otterman to gain some insight into what sort of reporter reveals irrelevant information including details of the wedding pictures of the accused, I found her own wedding announcement with the names of her bridegroom and parents. I won’t reveal them but will say that someone with the same name as Ms. Otterman’s mother has a pornographic website online. Yes, that’s irrelevant too.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Dangers of Tabula Rasa: It’s Like Carbon Monoxide Robert Weissberg

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

A little essay about the evils of Tabula Rosa–the idea that all people are born alike and can be easily molded by government. This is a truly toxic idea that is behind the current refugee crisis in Europe. Germany will not be able to digest Muslim immigrants no matter how hard they try and the evidence is everywhere. Just consider blacks in the US and gypsies in Europe. Lots of other examples, too. R.W.

Ideas have consequences but these can be deadly. Think the millions killed in seemingly endless religious strife and the carnage fueled by Marxism and Nazism. But less obvious is the damage inflicted by barely acknowledged bad ideas. The parallel might be death by carbon monoxide—scarcely noticed and almost painless but in the long run no less destructive than terrorism.

In today’s political landscape, the doctrine of human nature as a blank slate illustrates this carbon monoxide-like harm. Indeed, this culprit is so imperceptible that it barely makes any list of threats and those who embrace it often are actually celebrated for their hopeful views.

The blank slate view, frequently called by its Latin name Tabula Rasa basically holds that all humans are born without any mental content so, for better or worse, they are creatures of the environment. The opposite is that many human traits are hard-wired genetically and thus impervious to environmental manipulation. Going one step further, as a result of evolutionary divergence people sharing similar physical traits, for example, members of various racial or ethnic groups, differ at birth in terms of propensity for violence, intellectual ability, and multiple other readily measureable (and often obvious) dispositions. Current unspeakable popular stereotypes reflect this reality—the hard-working orderly German or the loquacious Irish. Note well—no psychologist who studies this subject claims that innate group differences are totally determinative. There will always be some lazy Germans or tongue-tied Irishmen.

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Saving Ethiopian Jews

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

Thirty years ago, following the large-scale evacuation of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in Operation Moses, Menachem Begin launched a follow-up operation to rescue hundreds more languishing in Sudanese refugee camps. A BBC documentary tells the story. (Video, 24 minutes.)

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2016/01/saving-ethiopian-jews/

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Cologne Cathedral Under Attack It wasn’t only infidel women defiled last New Year’s Eve, but Germany’s Christian religion and civilization as well. Stephen Brown

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

It is the symbol of a city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the most recognised and greatest symbol of German Catholicism and Gothic architecture. But that didn’t save Germany’s world-renowned Cologne Cathedral from a prolonged, humiliating and deafening assault from fireworks during last New Year’s Eve mass to mark the year’s end.
Barbara Schock-Werner, who served as cathedral architect between 1999 and 2012, was present at the well-attended religious service along with several thousand other worshippers. Shock-Werner told the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine, that the cathedral experienced an unprecedented and massive rocket and ‘banger’ fireworks barrage that lasted the whole service.

“Again and again the north window of the cathedral was lit up red, because rocket after rocket flew against it,” she said. “And because of the ‘bangers’, it was very loud. The visitors to the service sitting on the north side had difficulties hearing. I feared at times that panic would break out.”

Cardinal Rainer Woelki, who presided at the New Year’s mass, also complained about the “massive disruptions.”

“During my sermon loud ‘bangers’ could be heard,” Woelki said in the paper, Die Welt. “I was already annoyed beforehand about the loud noises that were penetrating into the cathedral.”

Shock-Werner believes the religious service was deliberately “targeted for disruption” due to the attack’s timing. The mass took place between 6:30 p.m. and 7:45 p.m., which, she said, “is actually no time to be already shooting off New Year’s rockets in such great volume.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islam’s Sexual Abuses in Sweden and the “Cultural Challenge” Sweden and Europe will soon learn, the hard way, why women do not go out alone on the streets of Kabul. Nima Gholam Ali Pour

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

The sexual abuse incidents in Europe have exposed the logical flaws in the Swedish debate about immigration and they also show how unprepared Sweden and Europe are in facing the challenges that have arisen because of the migration crisis.

After women were assaulted by “asylum seekers” in several places in Europe, it emerged that it also had happened in Sweden. However, in Sweden this had happened in August 2015 at the “We are Sthlm” festival where about 150 girls had been victims of sexual abuse by “refugee youths” from Afghanistan.

The reason that this August 2015 incident was not reported until January 2016, was because one of Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, and the Swedish police, who had access to the information, did not report these incidents to the public.

Dagens Nyheter is known as a newspaper that romanticizes immigration and multiculturalism but the actions of the police shocked many in Sweden, because the police are one of the institutions in Sweden that many Swedes have great confidence in. The explanation that the police chief Peter Ågren gave for not reporting the sexual abuses in August 2015 was:

“This is a sore point, sometimes, we do not dare to say how things really are because we believe it will play into the hands of the Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats). We have to take responsibility for this within the police.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Is Hillary Too Paranoid to be President? Fear, hate and conspiracy theories are destroying Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s political future is caught between an old hippie and the FBI.

Under fire, her collapsing campaign is retreating into paranoia and conspiracy theories. The Intelligence Community Inspector General, an Obama appointee, is being accused of conspiring with Republicans. The rise of Bernie Sanders is being attributed to “dark money” and political enemies by Clintonworld.

Hillary Clinton has a longstanding tendency to turn to a dark conspiratorial mindset when things don’t go her way. She blamed her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky on a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. Her close friend’s papers reveal that Hillary thought Bill had been “driven” to the affair by his “political adversaries”. It was easier for Hillary to blame her husband’s misbehavior on Republicans than to deal with reality. And her campaign is showing that her worldview hasn’t changed any since then.

The real story is that Hillary Clinton’s paranoia preemptively trashed her own campaign.

The entire FBI investigation would not exist if Hillary Clinton had just followed the law. Instead she chose to engage in a preemptive cover-up of her emails as preparation for her presidential campaign. The job of Secretary of State had never meant anything to her except as a stepping stone to the White House. She took it to fundraise and build up her resume while maintaining total control over her emails, in violation of the law, while displaying no regard for national security by storing highly classified materials on her own server. But instead of protecting her campaign, the cover-up created its biggest challenge.

The revelation that emails containing beyond top secret intelligence from “special access programs” ended up on her server, which according to a former CIA officer placed the lives of intelligence sources in danger, shows that Hillary’s paranoia not only endangered national security, but even risked lives.

The same thing happened once again with Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton was so determined to avoid a contested primary that she raised obscene amounts of money to intimidate potential rivals. This desperate fundraising strategy instead backfired by creating controversies around some of her donors and alienating the voters that she was raising money to influence.

POLITICS Comments turned off

NRO- AGAINST TRUMP SYMPOSIUM A PARTIAL LIST- MY CHOICES

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430126/donald-trump-conservatives-oppose-nomination
GLENN BECK, DAVID BOAZ, L. BRENT BOZELL III
MONA CHAREN, BEN DOMENECH. CAL THOMAS
THOMAS SOWELL, JOHN PODHORETZ ,KATIE PAVLICH
MICHAEL B. MUKASEY, EDWIN MEESE III,ANDREW C. McCARTHY
YUVAL LEVIN, MARK HELPRIN

POLITICS Comments turned off

Against Trump By The Editors NRO

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

Trump’s political opinions have wobbled all over the lot. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV star has supported abortion, gun control, single-payer health care à la Canada, and punitive taxes on the wealthy. (He and Bernie Sanders have shared more than funky outer-borough accents.) Since declaring his candidacy he has taken a more conservative line, yet there are great gaping holes in it.

His signature issue is concern over immigration — from Latin America but also, after Paris and San Bernardino, from the Middle East. He has exploited the yawning gap between elite opinion in both parties and the public on the issue, and feasted on the discontent over a government that can’t be bothered to enforce its own laws no matter how many times it says it will (President Obama has dispensed even with the pretense). But even on immigration, Trump often makes no sense and can’t be relied upon. A few short years ago, he was criticizing Mitt Romney for having the temerity to propose “self-deportation,” or the entirely reasonable policy of reducing the illegal population through attrition while enforcing the nation’s laws. Now, Trump is a hawk’s hawk.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

The Battle for the Soul of the Right By Rich Lowry

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

At the moment, the Republican establishment is relevant to the presidential-nomination battle only as an epithet.

Less than two weeks from the Iowa caucus, the fight for the Republican nomination isn’t so much a vicious brawl between the grass roots and the establishment as it is a bitter struggle between traditional conservatism and populism that few could have foreseen.

Conservatism has always had a populist element, encapsulated by the oft-quoted William F. Buckley Jr. line that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But the populism was tethered to, and in the service of, an ideology of limited-government constitutionalism.

The fight between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump is over whether that connection will continue to exist, and whether the conservatism (as represented by Cruz) or the populism (as represented by Trump) will be ascendant. Cruz did all he could as long as possible to accommodate Trump, but now that the fight between them is out in the open, the differences are particularly stark.

Cruz is a rigorous constitutionalist. He’s devoted much of his career to defending the Constitution and has argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court. Trump has certainly heard of the Constitution, but he may know even less about it than he knows about the Bible.

Cruz is an advocate of limited government who is staking everything in Iowa on a principled opposition to the ethanol mandate. As a quasi-mercantilist and crony capitalist, Trump isn’t particularly bothered by the size of government and is happily touting his support for a bigger ethanol mandate.