Displaying posts published in

February 2018

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Macron Vows to Reform Islam in France “It is time to bring in a new generation.” by Soeren Kern

By on February 13th, 2018

The overall objective of President Macron’s plan is to ensure that French law takes precedence over Islamic law for Muslims living in the country.

The plan, as currently conceived, is vague and short on details, but appears to involve three broad pillars: determining who will represent Muslims in France; delineating how Islam in France will be financed; and defining how imams in France will be trained.

“It is time to bring in a new generation. We have seen fifteen years of debate to defend the interests of foreign states.” — Hakim el-Karoui, a French-Tunisian expert on Islam who is advising Macron on the reforms.

French President Emmanuel Macron, in a declared effort to “fight fundamentalism” and “preserve national cohesion,” has promised to “lay the groundwork for the entire reorganization of Islam in France.”

According to Macron, the plan, similar in ambition to Austria’s Islam Law, is aimed at seeking to “better integrate” Islam in France in order to “place it in a more peaceful relationship with the state.”

A key priority is to reduce outside interference by restricting foreign funding for mosques, imams and Muslim organizations in France. The plan’s overall objective is to ensure that French law takes precedence over Islamic law for Muslims living in the country.

In a February 11 interview with the Journal du Dimanche, Macron said that the plan, which is being coordinated by the Interior Ministry, will be announced within the next six months: “We are working on the structuring of Islam in France and also on how to explain it,” Macron said. “My goal is to rediscover what lies at the heart of secularism—the possibility of being able to believe as well as not to believe—in order to preserve national cohesion and the possibility of having free religious conscience.”

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Erdogan’s Turkey: Making Trouble Everywhere by Burak Bekdil

By on February 13th, 2018

Since the failed coup in August 2016, the government says, it has purged more than 107,000 government employees for alleged links to the coup attempt. Worse, according to a Supreme Court justice, the Turkish government is investigating a total of 6.9 million citizens, or about 8.6% of all Turks.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has warned international companies drilling for oil and gas off Cyprus that these hydrocarbons are within Turkey’s continental shelf. Cavusoglu said that Turkey “is prepared to take all necessary measures” to protect its rights, and those of the Turkish Cypriots, in the eastern Mediterranean.

On January 26, several thousand Turkish Cypriots marched against what they say is Turkey’s unwanted influence. Protesters braved pounding rain to voice their opposition to Turkey’s agitation of “fascist and extremist” segments of their society.

Erdogan’s Turkey apparently has an ideological incompatibility with the word “peace.” This outright bullying can target any nation at any time. Optimists who think it might fade away will be proven wrong once again.

In official language, Turkey is in a state of emergency ever since a failed putsch, allegedly masterminded by a self-exiled cleric, killed nearly 250 people on the evening of July 15, 2016. Since then, the government says, it has purged more than 107,000 government employees for alleged links to the coup attempt. Worse, according to a Supreme Court justice, the Turkish government is investigating a total of 6.9 million citizens, or about 8.6% of all Turks.

Even “not-warmongering” can be associated with being a terrorist. More than 300 activists were arrested for their opposition to Turkey’s military incursion into northern Syria. That number did not include the 11 doctors who are members of the Turkish Medical Association who were arrested for calling for a halt to the offensive. (They were later released but will stand trial). In addition, Turkey has asked Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to remove posts on the military offensive.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Triumph of the Shills By Boris Zelkin

By on February 13th, 2018

Let’s begin with Godwin and get it out of the way.

Imagine for a moment that Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Third Reich, was an amicable fellow (which he was not), smiled often (which he didn’t), and decided to go on a goodwill tour of the West, with the cutest cheerleaders from the Hitler Youth in tow.

Imagine further that the Western media, knowing the scale of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, focused all its coverage on how cute the kids were and how well put-together Goebbels was—such a dashing fellow with his bespoke Hugo Boss suits, Italian shoes, and perfectly coiffed hair. Never mind his regime’s death camps, or its military ambitions, or its summary executions.

Sadly, over the past few days, this contrafactual seems far less far-fetched as Western media took on the role of Leni Riefenstahl—glamorizing and spreading propaganda for the murderous rogue regime of North Korea, all the while trivializing its human rights abuses.

North Korea sent Kim Yo-jong, sister of Kim Jong-un and the nation’s director of “Propaganda and Agitation,” on a “charm offensive” to South Korea over the weekend. With cheerleaders and pop-stars in tow, her mission was to help rehabilitate North Korea’s image and shift focus away from the regime’s human rights abuses and away from the fact that the Hermit Kingdom, essentially, is a giant prison. The Western media was all too happy to report on Kim’s sense of style, her shoes, her hair, and lack of makeup—to the exclusion of the moaning, emaciated elephant in the room.

Malicious, Lazy, or Both?

There could be many reasons for this embarrassing spectacle—ranging from outright complicity, to political malice, to plain old laziness. Most likely it’s that pre-existing biases and journalistic laziness are creating a witch’s brew that threatens to glamorize evil.

Western journalists are so blinded by disdain for the Trump Administration that any chance to embarrass the president and hurt his agenda is seen as a welcome opportunity. Reporting on the superficial North Korean overtures as though they were genuine while noting Mike Pence’s reluctance to engage those attempts is creating a moral equivalency between a vice president they don’t like with a murderess. Yes, this may hurt Trump politically, but at the cost of “normalizing” (to use a popular term these days) one of the most repressive regimes on the planet.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Our New Secessionists By Roger Kimball

By on February 13th, 2018

Item 1: “People now marvel how it came to pass that he should have been selected as the representative man of any party. His . . . efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world.”

Item 2: “A tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.”

Item 3: “He is evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.”

Item 4: “Heartfelt keening of shame and revulsion was heard throughout the land.”

These nuggets refer, of course, to the president. But which president? Items 1 and 2 refer to . . . whom? If you said “Donald Trump,” you are only half right. Item 2 does refer to President Trump. It is from David Remnick’s hysterical threnody in The New Yorker, published in the early hours of November 9, 2016. But Item 1 refers not to Trump but to Abraham Lincoln. And it comes not from some rabid secessionist but from the Salem Advocate, a newspaper published in Lincoln’s home state of central Illinois.

Items 3 and 4 are easy. Any woke member of The Resistance will guess that the “inferior character” must be Donald Trump. But it isn’t. The great orator Edward Everett was also referring to Lincoln. Item 4 comes to us from “Annals of Resistance,” a series of skirling anti-Trump dispatches in the Huffington Post.

It is not news that Lincoln, who won the election of 1860 with only 39.8 percent of the popular vote, was deeply unpopular. His popularity was in freefall until September 3, 1864, when General Sherman telegrammed the news “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” Military triumph earned Lincoln a narrow victory over George McClellan in the 1864 election. He remained deeply unpopular, however, until John Wilkes Booth inaugurated the process of his beatification in April 1865.

I think of Lincoln and his contemporary unpopularity because of the secessionist mood that is still, in some fetid redoubts, rippling through the country. Most colleges and universities are gigantic petri dishes for the production of this toxin, as are many elite organs of opinion. The New York Review of Books, for example, warned that with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, “We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half.” Which is to say, since the Civil War.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FBI-gate: The Outlines of the Story Are Coming into Focus By Thomas Lifson

By on February 13th, 2018

Thanks to the work of smart and hardworking (non-mainstream) journalists, we can peek just a bit over the horizon and see where the story of the weaponization of the FBI via a senior-level cabal is going from here. I use the word “story” deliberately, because that is the way public opinion forms itself on major political affairs. The progressives in the media and politics have long understood this. The cast of the story is now set, and some dramatic plot points have been identified. The ending hasn’t been written yet, of course, but the villains are identifying themselves or being exposed, and some of the heroes are emerging. We are on the cusp of a drama much bigger than Watergate breaking open, and its story elements are compelling.

In the calm before the storm breaks, the mainstream media and the Democrat attack squad from the House Intel committee [i] are in the midst of utterly discrediting themselves. Once the story breaks into the open, indictments will be handed down, and the witnesses, hostile and cooperating, will be heard in hearings and in court. They have worked together to cover up and distract from the story, but the truth will out, and now it is becoming clear how that will happen.

The fake controversy over the ten-page Schiff memo is keeping the morale of the #resistance crowd up, but Schiff himself will go down in history as the guy who kicked sand in the eyes of the investigators. All that media effort in pushing the phony narrative of Russia collusion will make them into dupes and laughingstocks, once the solid evidence is brought to light that a conspiracy to push that phony narrative was run with key members of the Clinton machine working hand in glove with the cabal.

Continue reading →
HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

ISIS Deploys Wheelchair-Bound Suicide Bomber By Bridget Johnson

By on February 13th, 2018

A new ISIS video shows a wheelchair-bound jihadist being loaded into a bomb-outfitted pickup before he drives off and detonates the vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.

ISIS also shows what it claims to be women jihadists fighting alongside men in battle and claims their fight in Syria is now “the battle to avenge chaste women” as the “deceitful, atheist Kurds” have women commanders on the front lines defeating the terror group.

The film from ISIS’ official al-Hayat Media Center is the seventh part of the terror groups’s “Inside the Khilafah” series released in Arabic and English; the familiar English-language narrator has a North American accent.

“The chaste mujahid woman journeying to her Lord with the garments of purity and faith, seeking revenge for her religion and for the honor of her sisters imprisoned by the apostate Kurds,” the narrator says as a pickup is shown with a trio of purported female fighters in the bed.

None of the head-to-toe black-clad women speak in the video, and it’s unclear if they’re actually women. At one point, as a chador-clad fighter runs in slow-motion along with male fighters, the women’s garment flips up enough to show what appear to be men’s sneakers and pants beneath.

The video describes “coordinated, multi-pronged” attacks south of the Euphrates river and shows various purported captures and tortures of Kurds before wrapping up with a jihadist referred to as Abu Abdillah Ash-Shami bidding farewell to his crying daughter and nephew. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Communist Activist to Tucker: North Koreans Are ‘Healthiest-Looking People in the World’ By Debra Heine

By on February 13th, 2018

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson began his show Monday evening by slamming the U.S. media’s unseemly crush on North Korean official Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of Kim Jong-un. The 30-year-old Jong is deputy director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department and a member of the North Korean politburo.

Media outlets over the weekend proclaimed that she “stole the show” at the Olympics and won the diplomatic gold medal. The Washington Post dubbed her “the Ivanka Trump of North Korea.”

Carlson argued that progressives have had a long history of supporting the world’s most repressive regimes and invited a member of the Communist Party in America to help him prove his point.

Deirdre Griswold, editor of the newspaper for the Workers World Party, came to the show armed with anti-war talking points, which is what she pushed no matter what Tucker asked her.

Griswold began by telling Carlson that she’s been to both North and South Korea and wanted to let the Foxe News viewers know that neither country wants war with the United States.

“We’re in the process of moving towards a nuclear war,” she declared. “The Korean people know very much what war is like and they’re not for it!”

Tucker tried to get the avowed communist to tell him which Korea she preferred, North or South, because she’d been to both countries.

“One is obviously the world’s last Stalinist regime,” Tucker noted. “It’s pretty rigidly Marxist — that’s North Korea. South Korea is floridly capitalist. It’s a market-based economy, which, of course, you reject. Which country would you rather live in personally?” he quizzed her.

But Griswold didn’t want to “debate” that issue because she had “really important” anti-war talking points that she needed to keep talking about.

When Carlson argued that North Korea is a closed country, she retorted that North Koreans know a lot more than Americans think, and cited their alleged 100 percent literacy rate as evidence.

Tucker pointed out that they “can’t read anything but the propaganda,” but Griswold was too busy reciting her anti-war, anti-American talking points to respond. She argued that the North Koreans were not “prisoners” in their own country. They just want to get out from under the threat of war imposed on them by the United States.

CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Mattis: Israel Doesn’t ‘Have to Wait Until Their Citizens are Dying Under Attack’ to Strike Iran Targets By Bridget Johnson

By on February 13th, 2018

Defense Secretary James Mattis said Israel exercised its “absolute right to defend itself” in shooting down an Iranian drone that entered the Jewish State’s airspace from Syria.

The UAV entry into Israeli airspace sparked a response from the Israeli Defense Forces that included striking a dozen Iranian targets in Syria just over an hour later.

The drone was reportedly a copy of an American model, the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel UAV, with an 85-foot wingspan that was captured by Iran in December 2011. IDF Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said the drone “was detected long before crossing Israeli territory.” It was in Israeli airspace for about a minute and a half before being shot down by an Israeli Air Force Apache attack helicopter.

That was at 4:25 a.m. At 5:34 a.m., IAF jets launched an assault against Iranian targets in Syria including three aerial defense batteries. Iran fired anti-aircraft missiles at the Israeli jet, striking one. Two pilots ejected and landed in Israeli territory; one suffered serious injuries.

At 8:45 a.m., the IDF launched a “large-scale attack” against “the Syrian aerial defense array and additional Iranian targets in Syria.” Sirens sounded in northern Israel because of the missiles fired at Israeli jets, and the attack was over just before 9 a.m.

En route to Rome on Sunday for an anti-ISIS conference, Mattis said the U.S. had no involvement in the operation “on a military basis.”

“It is interesting that everywhere we find trouble in the Middle East, you find the same thing behind it. Whether it be in Yemen or Beirut, or in Syria, in Iraq, you always find Iran engaged,” he added. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

‘Wallis in Love’ Challenges a Royal Love Story Andrew Morton’s biography of Wallis Simpson upends the accepted wisdom about her marriage; ‘a story of bitterness, disappointment and ultimately failure’By Ellen Gamerman

By on February 13th, 2018

Wallis Simpson is buried on the grounds of Windsor Castle in England, next to Edward VIII, the king who abdicated the throne to be with her.

But their seemingly towering romance—he threw it all away for her!—crumbles in the hands of biographer Andrew Morton. “She lies next to a man she came to despise,” he writes, “buried in a land owned by a family she hated and in a country she loathed.”
‘Wallis in Love’ is scheduled for release on Tuesday.

Mr. Morton’s book out on Tuesday, “Wallis in Love: The Untold Life of the Duchess of Windsor, the Woman Who Changed the Monarchy,” upends accepted wisdom about this couple, describing a relationship based on mutual exploitation. Mrs. Simpson pursues Edward in hopes of becoming queen, not realizing the havoc her two divorces will wreak on her quest. Edward dreads becoming king and finds a solution in his adoration of this American woman, whose past disqualifies him from the royal job.

Two days before their wedding in 1937, Mr. Morton writes, Mrs. Simpson met with the man she really loved, Herman Livingston Rogers. Mr. Morton describes her seemingly offer to have Rogers’s baby and pass it off as Edward’s. His evidence for this claim is based on brief notes about the matter by Mrs. Simpson’s onetime ghostwriter, Cleveland Amory.

“It was a story of bitterness, disappointment and ultimately failure,” Mr. Morton said during an interview from Pasadena, Calif., where he lives when he isn’t in London.

Mr. Morton argues that the king’s 1936 abdication was, in the end, a one-sided decision. Edward’s marriage to Mrs. Simpson was forbidden due to her two divorces and living ex-husbands, but his abandonment of the throne to be with her was far from a given.

“The man who ostensibly loved her was making decisions about her future without any kind of sensible conversation,” Mr. Morton said in the interview. Not long after the abdication, Edward is described singing in a bathtub. Mrs. Simpson, however, is portrayed getting snubbed by British and American elites and exiled to a semi-royal life.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Big Public Works Dig Permitting and other reforms are a major policy breakthrough.

By on February 13th, 2018

The White House on Monday unveiled its plan to raise $1.5 trillion in capital for public works. This will cause sticker shock among Republicans, but the President’s innovative regulatory reforms deserve debate and may even garner some Democratic support.

President Trump is proposing to spend $200 billion in federal funds to leverage $1.3 trillion in state, local and private investment in public works. This bid is probably dead on arrival since Republicans have little appetite for more spending after blowing the budget sequestration caps last week.

Many bridges and airports need a face-lift, though claims of crumbling roads are overwrought and often politically motivated. One problem is that public works like other discretionary programs are being squeezed by entitlements, which constitute nearly two-thirds of federal spending. But even while politicians in Washington gripe that we—always the royal “we”—don’t spend enough on public works, they consistently prioritize other discretionary programs.

Consider: Of the $787 billion stimulus in 2009, only about $60 billion financed public works. Most was spent on safety-net programs and other progressive causes. More Hurricane Sandy recovery money went to “community development” than repairing train tunnels.

Many projects that do receive federal funding aren’t national priorities, such as California’s bullet train. That’s because the government typically awards “competitive” grants to politically favored projects rather than those that would produce the biggest economic benefits. The Obama Administration rigged cost-benefit analysis to reward projects that would promote public housing and reduce carbon emissions.

Continue reading →