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Daniel Johnson: How to Resist the End of Europe Are we Europeans doomed to suffer the loss of our inexhaustible cultural creativity, along with its source in Judeo-Christian tradition? The prospect must not be accepted.

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

I am deeply honored that my essay, “Does Have Europe Have a Future?,” elicited such substantial responses from four distinguished writers. All four have not only entered fair and useful comments on the essay but also contributed their own answers to the question posed in my title.

Peter Berkowitz and Wilfred McClay agree with me that the nation-state is not the source of Europe’s ills. And I agree with Berkowitz, following Alexis de Tocqueville, that European nations need to recover their tradition of freedom, just as I agree with McClay that such liberty must be limited by law, human or divine. It is refreshing to hear Americans encouraging Europeans to take pride in their patriotism and their national identities; in this respect, McClay rightly contrasts the grand traditions of European civilization, which gave birth to the United States and to so much else, with a European Union that is anything but united.

On this point, I part company with Claire Berlinski even as I’m grateful for her superb tour d’horizon and the weight she properly gives to the threat posed to Europe by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. To her, the only answer to the external threats menacing Europe is a single foreign and defense policy, which means strengthening and indeed uniting the European Union. I beg to differ: however much some European leaders may dream otherwise, the EU is not a military alliance. Nor do I recognize her description of German, French, and other EU military officers “eager” to “unleash” their forces against Europe’s enemies. That was not the case even during the cold war, much less now.

The only effective alliance we have is NATO, which implies an acceptance of U.S. leadership that the French still find unpalatable. France is indeed adept at launching policing operations in its former African colonies, but it is no more eager to support U.S. military operations in the Muslim world now than in 2003, when it refused to join the coalition against Saddam Hussein, or in 1986 when it denied President Reagan permission for American bombers to fly over France en route to Qaddafi’s Libya. True, the French are now bombing Islamic State (ISIS) forces in Syria and Iraq, but that is because ISIS poses a direct threat to France itself.

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The Death of America? by Paul R. Hollrah

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

In more than twelve years of writing a weekly essay on some of the most critical problems of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I’ve never been short of subject matter and I’ve never been at a loss for words… until now. For more than two months I have tried to find a way to address the question of what must be done to prosecute the war on radical Islam, while being fully aware that a committed communist, who may also be a “closet” Muslim jihadist, serves as commander in chief of U.S. military forces. Although I have never hesitated to go “out on a limb” to propose solutions that others may see as radical or “outside the box,” I have attempted to stay as close as possible to what I hope others would judge to be at least within the realm of possibility.

Having said that, and being aware that essentially everyone else in the western world remains wedded to the notion that the long term future of western civilization depends on our ability to find a way to peacefully coexist with Islamists… both radicals and moderates… I find myself of a different opinion. In order to be persuaded otherwise, I would have to see conclusive proof that somewhere… at some time in history… Muslims have set aside their goal of total world dominion in the interest of harmony and peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims. That proof simply does not exist. Instead, the so-called “moderate” Muslims appear to be nothing but a silent cheering section for radical jihadists.

Reading the history of Islam, it is tempting to believe that, for periods of years since the death of Mohammed in 632 A.D., Muslims throughout the world had finally decided to live as civilized human beings when, in fact, they were merely resting, re-arming, and preparing for the next major assault on Christianity, Judaism, and the rest of western culture.
According to an April 13, 2015, report by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), during calendar year 2011, for the third year in a row, Sunni Muslims accounted for the greatest number of terrorist attacks and fatalities. Of the more than 5,700 terror incidents during that year, some 56 percent were committed by Sunnis. As such, they were responsible for 12,533 fatalities, or 70 percent of all terrorist fatalities.

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Jane Elliot’s Racist Diversity Training Now Being Used to Abuse 7-Year-Olds Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

This is not only racism, it’s straightforward child abuse.

A first grade teacher in Florida is under investigation for an unapproved, controversial “lesson on racism” that left some students in tears.

Parents are complaining about a “lesson on racism” for first grade students at Minneola Elementary Charter School the day after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in which the teacher segregated her 7- and 8-year-old student by eye color then discriminated against some for several hours, WESH reports.

The teacher, who was not named in media reports, gave students with blue eyes candy and hugs, and ignored students with brown eyes, according to WFTV.

Minneola principal Sherry Watts told WFTV the lesson was not approved by administrators.

“The experiment shouldn’t have taken place at all,” she said. “It’s not appropriate for first grade.”

It’s not appropriate for any grade. This is Jane Elliot’s vileness filtering all the way down to first grade courtesy of teachers programmed with social justice hate.

Elliot’s technique was to emotionally abuse students in ways reminiscent of fringe cults and Soviet self-criticism sessions which break down an individual’s sense of identity by publicly attacking her sense of self.

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Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Simple Answers to False Claims : Dr. Shmuel Katz

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

Dr. Shmuel KatzDr. Shmuel Katz was born in Hungary and raised in Israel. He served as an IDF officer during the Six Day War (1967). As a doctor, he gained extensive trauma experience serving the IDF in the Yom Kippur War (1973). He is double-boarded in Surgery, a Fellow of the Israeli Surgical Society, a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, and a member of multiple medical societies.

It took the Arab propaganda machine decades of persistent, aggressive effort to convince many oblivious individuals – including some world leaders – of the canard that Jews illegally occupy Arab land, having “stolen it from Palestinians.”

The Mideast conflict may be complicated to solve, but is quite easily explained:

The Jewish people have an unbroken 4,000-year national history in the land of Israel.
Never in history has there been an Arab Palestinian State.
The Palestinian movement was founded to annihilate Israel.

Let’s look at some facts:

The Palestinian movement (PLO) was founded with the express purpose of destroying Israel. The PLO Covenant – adopted in 1964, long before Israel held any disputed territories – calls “to move forward on the path of jihad until complete and final victory is achieved,” i.e. the annihilation of Israel.

Fatah refers to Mohammed signing an insincere “peace treaty.”

This view permeates the Palestinian movement: Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah’s “Party of God,” and Hamas (acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) all share the goal of destroying Israel. Mahmoud Abbas’ political party – “Fatah” – is the name of chapter 48 of the Koran which describes Mohammed signing a “peace treaty” as a way to gain leverage and launch an attack.

At the root of Palestinian ideology is this “phased plan” to destroy Israel. Palestinian statesman Faisal Husseini described peace agreements with Israel as a Trojan Horse:

“If we agree to declare our state over what is now only 22 percent of Palestine, meaning the West Bank and Gaza – our ultimate goal is [still] the liberation of all historical Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] sea, even if this means that the conflict will last for another thousand years or for many generations.”

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ISIS’s Barbarity and Leftist Feminists’ Callous Heart When will Naomi Wolf, Naomi Klein and other “feminists” hear the cries of the Islamic State’s rape victims? Joseph Klein

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

ISIS’s brutality knows no bounds. Early medieval style beheadings, crucifixions, enslavement and rapes of women and young girls are ISIS’s calling cards. They have slaughtered or abducted thousands of civilians and have committed systematic genocide against Yazidis and Christians. Yet when reports of such acts of barbarism began to emerge in 2014, the progressive left either ignored the worst demonstrations of pure evil in our time or pooh-poohed them.

For example, the far left feminist Naomi Wolf, pretending to be an objective journalist, has demanded proof of ISIS transgressions. She questioned whether the videos of beheadings by ISIS jihadists were real. “So much about ISIS seems hyped/spun,” she said on her Facebook page in August 2014. In response to accounts of ISIS jihadists’ sexual exploitation of women, she bizarrely warned us to “remember the fake accounts of ‘the HUN’ raping Belgian women that drove everyone else into World War One.” Recall that Naomi Wolf has argued in the past that Muslim women veiling themselves are doing so as an expression of their own free choice.

The proof of ISIS’s barbarism is told both in staggering numbers and heart rendering first person accounts of women beaten and raped by the ISIS predators. An estimated 3,500 people are being held by ISIS as sexual slaves in Iraq alone, according to a United Nations report issued on January 19th by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq and the UN human rights office. “Those being held are predominantly women and children and come primarily from the Yezidi (sic) community, but a number are also from other ethnic and religious minority communities,” the report said.

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Don’t Buy the Hype about a Bloomberg Presidential Run By John Fund

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

In October last year, The Atlantic magazine detailed the 25 media boomlets over the past decade that have speculated Michael Bloomberg would run for president. Today the New York Times launched yet another one, reporting that the former New York mayor would be willing to spend “at least $1 billion of his fortune” on an independent race, should Bernie Sanders or a “gravely weakened” Hillary Clinton become the Democratic nominee.

While the public is clearly disenchanted with both major parties, the odds of the 73-year-old Bloomberg’s parachuting into the presidential race are laughably low. It’s true that more than 70 percent of voters think the country is on the wrong track, and that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have unfavorable ratings of above 50 percent with the general public. But as Michael Goodwin, a New York Post columnist who has frequent contact with Bloomberg, put it this weekend: “He won’t run if he can’t win, and anybody who sells him a vision of victory is suffering hallucinations or looking for a payday.”

Theoretically, the obstacles to beginning a race this late aren’t terribly daunting. Deadlines for ballot access in most states fall in July or August, so getting his name before voters as an independent would be nothing more than an expensive irritation for someone of Bloomberg’s wealth. Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News, estimates that Bloomberg would have to spend $5 million to $6 million to get ballot lines in all 50 states. The first deadline is in Texas, which requires 80,000 valid signatures on petitions be submitted by May 9 of this year.

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Our Post-Literate Politics By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

My friends and colleagues have said in National Review’s recently published symposium almost everything that there is to be said on the matter of Donald Trump, the vicious demagogue who currently leads the Republican presidential pack in national polls. I myself have written a small book on the subject. Forgive me for turning to one other aspect of the question, which is that the candidacy of Donald Trump is something that could not happen in a nation that could read.

This is the full flower of post-literate politics.

There are still individual Americans who can read, a fact for which we writers should say daily prayers of gratitude. There are even reading communities of a sort, and not only ladies’ pinot parties loosely organized around 50 Shades of Grey. Conservatives are great readers, which is why the overwhelmingly left-leaning world of New York City publishing constantly is looking forward to the next offering from Mark Levin or Bill O’Reilly, whose works produce literary profit sufficient to subsidize the careers of any number of poets and high-minded novelists. But we are not a nation that reads, or a nation that shares a living tradition of serious contemporary literature, fiction or nonfiction. Indeed, some critics of our Trump symposium sneered that none of the contributors had much in the way of “mass appeal,” as though the fact that our populist friends fail to read John Podhoretz and R. R. Reno were a judgment on those writers rather than on themselves. But serious writers, even those who manage to be both serious and popular at the same time, have rarely enjoyed much influence in the practical matter of winning elections: William F. Buckley could not carry Barry Goldwater very far on his own in an age when serious writing enjoyed much more prestige than it does today.

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The World They Made by Mark Steyn

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

On Wednesday’s show Rush Limbaugh discussed the Trump phenomenon through the lens of a 20-year-old Sam Francis article:

“Imagine giving this advice to a Republican presidential candidate: What if you stopped calling yourself a conservative and instead just promised to make America great again?” What do you think might happen in the current climate, where the middle class in the country feels totally left out of everything going on?

They feel like they’ve been targeted by every liberal Democrat policy that has not been stopped by the Republican Party. What if you dropped [talking] about the free market,” stop all of that, “and promised to fight the elites who were selling out American jobs? What if you just stopped talking about reforming Medicare and Social Security and instead said that the elites were failing to deliver better health care at a reasonable price? What if, instead of vainly talking about restoring the place of religion in society … you simply promised to restore the Middle American core,” and everything it stands for?

Rush’s view is that “nationalism and populism have overtaken conservatism in terms of appeal” – ie, that there are insufficient takers for conservatism. It comes to something when the nation’s Number One conservative talk-show host is putting it that way, but you can see what he’s getting at.

In contrast to the ebb and flow of eternally shifting multiparty systems, America has a rigid, inflexible two-party choice:

One party is supposed to be the party of big government, the other the party of small government. When the Big Government Party is in power, the government gets bigger, and, when the Small Government Party is in power, the government gets bigger.

One party is supposed to be the party of social liberalism, the other the party of social conservatism. When the Socially Liberal Party is in power, the country gets more liberal, and, when the Socially Conservative Party is in power, the country gets more liberal.

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Switzerland ‘made secret deal with PLO’ after bomb attacks By Imogen Foulkes

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

Controversy is growing in Switzerland over an alleged secret deal, made almost 50 years ago, between the Swiss government and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

The agreement, detailed in a new book, was apparently designed to prevent terrorist attacks on Swiss territory.

In return, Switzerland would offer diplomatic support to the PLO.

It followed a series of attacks in 1969 and 1970 by Palestinian groups that caused huge concern in Switzerland.

In February 1969 gunmen opened fire at Zurich airport on an El Al plane, whose pilot died in the attack. The Swiss arrested the attackers

In 1970, a bomb on board a Swissair flight to Tel Aviv brought the plane down just outside Zurich, killing all 47 passengers and crew

In September 1970, a Swissair flight on its way to New York was hijacked. Two other airliners, one British, one American, were hijacked at the same time. All three ended up at Dawson’s Field airstrip in Jordan, where more than 300 passengers were held hostage

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The European Union Becomes Irrelevant In Resolving The Jewish-Arab Conflict, David Singer

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

The Council of the European Union (EU) has disqualified itself from influencing any resolution of the 100 years old Jewish-Arab conflict following the release of its “Council conclusions on the Middle East Peace Process” on 18 January.
Continuing its partisan support of Arab demands the EU has reaffirmed its July 2014 position:
“The EU recalls its willingness to engage further with regional partners on the basis of the Arab Peace Initiative which provides key elements for the settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as the opportunity for building a regional security framework.” Key elements of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative included:
1. “Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights to the lines of June 4, 1967 as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon.” 2. “The acceptance of the establishment of a Sovereign Independent Palestinian State on the Palestinian territories occupied since the 4th of June 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza strip, with east Jerusalem as its capital” Israel’s agreement to negotiate with the PLO on the basis of the 2003 Bush Roadmap was contingent on the removal of all references to the Arab Peace Initiative from the Roadmap along with 13 other detailed reservations.

American Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice gave the following assurances to Israel on 23 May 2003:
“The roadmap was presented to the Government of Israel with a request from the President that it respond with contributions to this document to advance true peace. The United States Government received a response from the Government of Israel, explaining its significant concerns about the roadmap. The United States shares the view of the Government of Israel that these are real concerns and will address them fully and seriously in the implementation of the roadmap to fulfil the President’s vision of June 24, 2002.” This fundamental disconnect between the EU and Israel over the Arab Peace Initiative continues to detrimentally impact on their relationship.