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April 2017

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Peter Smith Islam’s Covergirls

By on April 26th, 2017

One doesn’t expect too much from the latest iterations of Western feminist thought, least of all thought itself, and the defence of the male-imposed burka and hijab makes the point. With “friends” like that, perhaps it’s time for lawmakers to protect Muslim women from misogynist coercion.
The new citizenship test for intending migrants will probably be window dressing. Clearly it is aimed at Muslims, which is entirely appropriate. They are the ones who have problems fitting in; wherever they go in the West. But asking people to commit to certain values and eschew others is close to worthless, unless combined with a lie-detector test. And I doubt the ABC would agree to that, if you get my meaning.

Maybe it’s time to reconsider something tangible like dress standards. My club has them and they work well. You always have the choice of staying out. It’s a question of how the matter is approached.

To be clear, within the confines of prevailing standards of decency, people should have the freedom to dress as they wish in purely public places. But the key phrase is ‘as they wish’. Our values are not consistent with any group of women being forced to wear what they would not freely choose to wear. The intolerant cannot be tolerated when it bears down on a vulnerable group of our fellow citizens.

In this case it is plain that the face of intolerance puts many women in unattractive clothing they would not freely choose to wear. We know this by applying self-reflection. We personally, would find it intolerable to dress from head to toe in black serge (or in any other colour) when walking on a hot Australian summer’s day. We also know this from looking at pictures of the way women chose to dress in Egypt, or in Afghanistan, or in Iran in earlier times when free of Islamic religious strictures. Empathy and common observation tells the tale. (editor: the picture below is of Cairo University students in 1978. Not a hijab to be seen.)

cairo university 1978

It is an affront to our value of gender equality to acquiesce to a particular group of women being forced, pressured or cajoled into wearing dowdy coveralls. We owe it to Muslim women in Australia to do something about it.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

White House Intervened to Toughen Letter on Iran Nuclear Deal President Donald Trump’s hard-line view on Iran was at odds with State Department diplomats By Jay Solomon and Carol E. Lee

By on April 26th, 2017

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump told aides to toughen a State Department letter last week that declared Iran in compliance with a landmark nuclear deal, senior U.S. officials involved in a policy review said.

Top White House officials said the initial letter the State Department submitted was too soft because it ignored Tehran’s destabilizing activities in the Middle East and support for regional terrorist groups, these officials said.

Mr. Trump personally weighed in on the redrafting of the letter, which was sent to Congress on April 18, the officials said. The final version highlighted Iran’s threatening regional behavior and called into question the U.S.’s long-term support for the multinational accord.

Mr. Trump also told Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to follow up the next day with a strident public message that the new administration was planning a shift on policy toward Iran, putting the nuclear deal in play, these officials said.

“An unchecked Iran has the potential to travel the same path as North Korea and take the world along with it,” Mr. Tillerson said at the State Department on April 19.

The episode highlighted the divisions between Mr. Trump’s hard-line position on Iran and the approach taken by some career State Department diplomats and many European allies. State Department officials didn’t respond to a request for comment on Mr. Tillerson’s role in the exchange.

The nuclear agreement, which was implemented in January 2016, constrained Iran’s nuclear capabilities in return for the lifting of most international sanctions, including some unilateral penalties imposed by the U.S. Treasury Department. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israel’s Prime Minister Scraps Meeting With Germany’s Top Diplomat Cancellation was response to foreign minister’s decision to meet a group critical of Israel’s armed forces, Netanyahu’s spokesman says By Andrea Thomas in Berlin and Rory Jones in Tel Aviv

By on April 26th, 2017

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel scrapped a meeting with Germany’s top diplomat hours before they were to meet on Tuesday, the latest sign of tension between Israel and one of its oldest Western allies.

A spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu said the decision came in response to the plan by German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel to meet representatives of Breaking the Silence, a nongovernmental organization critical of the conduct of Israeli armed forces in the Palestinian territories.

“Imagine if foreign diplomats visiting the United States or Britain met with NGOs that call American or British soldiers war criminals,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement. “Leaders of those countries would surely not accept this.”

Mr. Gabriel, who is vice chancellor in Germany’s government and was on his first official trip to Israel since his appointment as foreign minister this year, said the snub would have no lasting impact on bilateral relations but expressed surprise at the Israeli premier’s decision.

“Imagine we were to invite Mr. Netanyahu to Germany and he wanted to meet with NGOs that also exist here and we were to say, ‘If you do that we will abort the visit.’ People would call us crazy.”

Later in the day, Mr. Gabriel declined to take a telephone call from Mr. Netanyahu, an Israeli official said. In Berlin, the German Foreign Ministry said it couldn’t confirm that account.

Mr. Gabriel was expected to meet later Tuesday with representatives of Breaking the Silence, which collects testimony, often anonymously, from members of the Israeli military on its operations in the territories.

A spokesman for the organization couldn’t be reached for comment.

Postwar Germany has been among Israel’s most steadfast allies for decades. Chancellor Angela Merkel once described protecting the security of Israel as part of Germany’s “raison d’être.”

But the relationship has been put under strain recently, with Berlin becoming more critical of the lack of progress in efforts to reach a negotiated settlement in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Germany sharply criticized Israel’s retroactive legalization of thousands of settler dwellings in the West Bank in February. The Palestinians said all Israeli communities in the territory are illegal under international law.

That same month, Berlin postponed for a year a joint German-Israeli cabinet meeting planned for May in Jerusalem because of what it called “scheduling difficulties” caused by Germany’s presidency of the Group of 20 largest economies. CONTINUE AT SITE

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Repeal Yale’s Trustee Gag Rule We asked candidates their views on free speech. The university told them they were obliged to shut up. By Lauren Noble and Richard West

By on April 26th, 2017

Ms. Noble is founder and executive director of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale. Mr. West is dean emeritus of New York University’s Stern School of Business and a board member of the Buckley Program.

With free speech under attack on campuses nationwide, university trustees have generally remained on the sidelines. Yale seems determined to keep them there. The William F. Buckley Jr. Program recently began an effort to encourage a more open process for electing alumni trustees, known as fellows. So far we’ve gotten nowhere.

Last year we invited the three candidates for alumni fellow to participate in a web forum on free speech and diversity of thought. To our surprise, not one responded. Then we received an email from Kimberly Goff-Crews, Yale’s vice president for student life, explaining it was “university practice that Alumni Fellow candidates do not campaign in any way” but “stand for election solely based on the biographical statements in the Alumni Fellow ballot.” This she described as “both a constraint placed on candidates, and a promise made to them in terms of the demands of the election process.”

This year we penned an open letter to the trustees asking them to encourage candidates to participate in our forum. More than 400 alumni have signed on. So far Ms. Goff-Crews hasn’t budged. In an interview with the Yale Daily News, she repeated, almost word for word, last year’s assertion that campaigning is forbidden. University administrators also canceled the Daily News’s scheduled interviews with the trustee candidates.

The executive director of the Association of Yale Alumni, Weili Cheng, defended the gag rule. The Daily News reports “she feared that campaigning might lead to conflict in the alumni community” and quoted her as saying: “Look what happened with the presidential campaign.”

But the current process is unfair to the candidates and the alumni. If university administrators will not provide the basis for both groups to help ensure an informed choice of trustees, what is the purpose of having an election? CONTINUE AT SITE

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Testing China on North Korea Tougher sanctions would show if Beijing wants to restrain its client.

By on April 26th, 2017

President Trump called on the United Nations Security Council Monday to adopt new and stronger sanctions on North Korea. Diplomats are skeptical that such measures would change Pyongyang’s behavior because it is already economically isolated, doesn’t mind inflicting pain on its people, and will never negotiate away its nuclear weapons. A new sanctions push is nonetheless worth a try—not least as a test of Chinese willingness to confront the threat it has helped to nurture.

It’s a myth that Pyongyang already faces tough sanctions, since by several measures North Korea is well down the list of sanctions targets. There’s plenty of room to tighten financial and trade restrictions on the Kim Jong Un regime. The main obstacle has been China’s efforts to water down sanctions and veto tougher measures.

Beijing also has failed to enforce sanctions that it has agreed to. In recent years a U.N. Panel of Experts has documented how Chinese companies and banks violate U.N. sanctions against North Korea. Last year it determined that Bank of China ’s Singapore branch allowed 605 payments on behalf of North Korean entities. Beijing blocked the release of that report, though its contents leaked to the press.

Beijing has long viewed the collapse of the Kim regime as a worse threat to China’s interests than are the North’s nuclear missiles. And previous U.S. administrations chose to tiptoe around China’s resistance in the hope of making incremental diplomatic progress.

Mr. Trump has taken a different approach as the North continues to increase its nuclear stockpile and its missile-delivery systems, threatening unilateral action against North Korea while seeking China’s help. The Trump Administration is signaling in particular that it won’t tolerate a North that can target U.S. cities for destruction with long-range missiles that can carry a nuclear warhead. The U.S. has done this with multiple public statements, private talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and an invitation this week to the entire U.S. Senate for a briefing on the threat.

“This is a real threat to the world, whether we want to talk about it or not,” Mr. Trump said Monday at a White House meeting of Security Council envoys. “North Korea is a big world problem, and it’s a problem we have to finally solve. People have put blindfolds on for decades, and now it’s time to solve the problem.”

As we’ve recommended, the U.S. has the legal authority to increase pressure on the North by applying “secondary sanctions”—denying access to the U.S. financial system to companies and financial institutions in third countries that conduct illegal business with North Korea. Past administrations were reluctant to do so for fear of upsetting Beijing, since most of the targets of such sanctions would be Chinese. If Beijing refuses to act against the North, such sanctions would be a minimum test of Mr. Trump’s seriousness.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The ‘Hundred Days’ Humbug Blame FDR for this arbitrary standard, whose meaning has changed since 1933. By Charles Kesler

By on April 26th, 2017

President Trump is criticized for things he has done and for things he has left undone. What is unreasonable is the additional arbitrary standard to which he, like all modern presidents, is held liable: what he has accomplished, and failed to, in his first hundred days in office.

Why is the figure of 100 days so important? As though Franklin D. Roosevelt doesn’t have enough to answer for, here is another of his legacies.

FDR spoke of “the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal” in his fireside chat of July 24, 1933—142 days after his March 4 inauguration. He was referring to “the historical special session of the Congress” he had convened, which opened March 9 and adjourned June 16. That is, the Hundred Days were legislative days, not executive days.

Today’s Congress commonly leaves Washington three days a week. If you wanted to apply Roosevelt’s implicit criterion of 100 congressional days, you’d be counting not to April 30, but into July or August—or even September or later, since Congress is in recess the whole month of August.

It’s true that in 1933 Roosevelt put the 73rd Congress through its paces. But the reason, or excuse, for the rush of legislation was an economic emergency, signaled by the steadily worsening bank panic. To get the closed banks open again was the aim of the first piece of legislation submitted, the Emergency Banking Act—introduced on March 9 at 12:37 p.m., and on its way to the president at 7:23.

Absent the bank panic, the Hundred Days would not have started with such a bang. Without a similar emergency, why should we expect a president’s (or Congress’s) first hundred days to have anything like the same urgency and focus?

Congress did enact leading elements of the New Deal during the Hundred Days. But within two years the Supreme Court had gutted the National Industrial Recovery Act. The administration never attempted to revive it. In 1936 the same fate befell the Agricultural Adjustment Act, though in less sweeping fashion. Haste makes waste. Perhaps the most famous piece of legislation associated with the New Deal, the Social Security Act of 1935, had nothing to do with the Hundred Days.

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