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May 2018

ISRAEL Comments turned off

UNRWA’s “Palestinian Refugee” Fraud? by Ruthie Blum

By on May 24th, 2018

It is no wonder, then, that the classified State Department report’s findings — showing that billions of taxpayer dollars have been funneled over the years into an organization that has seems to have been perpetuating a fraud — that the Obama administration kept its content a secret from the American public.

UNRWA is anything but a humanitarian organization interested in the welfare of the Palestinians whom it claims to have spent the past nearly 70 years assisting. It is, rather, a self-serving political body that has bolstered Arab/Palestinian rejectionism and perpetuated Palestinian suffering, thereby preventing peace and prosperity.

Its dissolution is long overdue.

In early 2018, President Donald Trump froze a large portion of the funding that the United States provides annually for UNRWA (the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees a in the Near East). Prior to imposing the $125 million freeze, Trump tweeted: “[W]e pay the Palestinians HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect.”

The president’s move came in response to the fact that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his henchmen yet again were rejecting American and Israeli peace overtures. Yet it was both welcome and necessary for reasons well beyond Palestinian intransigence. UNRWA not only has an abominable record of ties to terrorism, which makes a mockery of its mandate to ” provide relief, human development and protection services;” but its entire existence is based on a false premise — a special UN definition of “refugee” for Palestinians that sets them apart from other people in the world categorized as such. It thus has been able for decades to keep cash flowing freely into its coffers, providing “humanitarian services” for millions of Palestinians who are not refugees by any measure. As the ZOA’s Morton Klein and Daniel Mandel recently wrote:

“All this stands in stark contrast to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the international body that deals with all refugee problems other than the Palestinian Arabs. UNHRC observes a universal definition of refugee status, one that applies solely to those who actually fled their country during hostilities, civil war, natural disaster, or other disturbances. UNHCR works to resettle refugees quickly and dismantle the temporary refugee camps housing them. Nor does it count descendants as refugees.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Canada’s Beach Jihad Has the “Islamic Revolutionary Force” been planting glass and needles on Canada’s beaches? Robert Spencer

By on May 24th, 2018

Brad Hammond lives on the waterfront at Kirby’s Beach in Ontario, and he had never seen anything like it: glass shards and sewing needles had been deliberately planted at intervals along the beach, leading to the beach being closed for the first time in his memory. Another beach area, Bracebridge Bay Park, was closed as well. For the first time, but not likely the last, jihad had come to the beaches of Ontario.

There is no doubt that the glass and needles had been placed on the beach deliberately. “It was pretty much the width of the beach but it was in clumps, so you could tell it had been seeded in different areas,” Hammond said. Global News added that “Bracebridge Mayor Graydon Smith said the discovery of the needles and glass goes beyond what municipal staff would typically encounter after a spring melt.”

But who did this? Global News professed not to know, saying: “What remains unclear is who is responsible.” However, several weeks ago, Toronto-area media outlets received a letter purporting to be from a group called the Islamic Revolutionary Force, vowing to “destroy your beaches from Toronto to North Bay.”

The letter explained: “We do this because you reject Islam and follow the Great Satan. Infidels you allow your women to disgracefully, shamelessly parade around your beaches all but naked!” The letter writer claimed that the group had already begun to target the beaches: “We have started with the Muskoka’s and other tourist destinations. Your Northern towns are extremely easy targets, unlike cities.” Kirby’s Beach and Bracebridge Bay Park are in Muskoka. The letter says: “Yes we have destroyed your beaches over the winter months with snowmobiles, making them unsafe and all but unusable.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The UK’s FGM Clinics When multiculturalism comes to town. Jon Hall

By on May 24th, 2018

Wales is opening its first female genital mutilation (FGM) clinic to provide medical and psychological help for victims of the abhorrent practice.

It’s estimated that 2,000 women and girls in Wales live with FGM.

FGM is often carried out for religious and cultural reasons, usually associated with Islam. In some sects of Islam, FGM is mandatory. It is promoted by the Ulema Council in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country by population.

According to The Independent, one FGM case is reported every hour in the U.K.

The practice has been illegal in the United Kingdom since 1985, but British authorities have failed to bring forth one successful prosecution. In 2014, the first FGM clinic opened in London, and four more clinics have opened since then.

In Wales alone, 123 victims were treated for FGM in 2016 – with 44 of the victims being children under 18.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Mogadishu, Minnesota A massive daycare fraud in America’s most welcoming state raises questions about the limits of assimilation.Scott W. Johnson

By on May 24th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/html/mogadishu-minnesota-15924.html

When it was noted that the carry-on bags of multiple airline passengers traveling from Minneapolis to Somalia contained millions of dollars in cash, on a regular basis, law enforcement was naturally curious to know where the money came from and where it was going. It soon emerged that millions of taxpayer dollars, and possibly much more, had been stolen through a massive scam of Minnesota’s social-services sector, specifically through fraudulent daycare claims. To make matters worse, the money appears to have wound up in areas of Somalia controlled by al-Shabab, the Islamic jihadist group responsible for numerous terrorist outrages.

Starting in the 1990s, the State Department directed thousands of refugees from Somalia’s civil war to Minnesota, which is now home to the largest population of Somalis outside Somalia itself. As the Washington Times noted in 2015, in Minnesota, these refugees “can take advantage of some of America’s most generous welfare and charity programs.” Professor Ahmed Samatar of Macalester College in St. Paul observed, “Minnesota is exceptional in so many ways but it’s the closest thing in the United States to a true social democratic state.” A high-trust, traditionally homogenous community with a deep civil society marked by thrift, industriousness, and openness, Minnesota seemed like the ideal place to locate an indigent Somali population now estimated at 100,000.

Public discussion of the resulting contradictions has been limited, to say the least. Minnesota governor Mark Dayton has sought to stifle public discussion with tired imputations of bigotry and intolerance. Indeed, he advised native Minnesotans with qualms about immigrant resettlement to move out. “If you are that intolerant, if you are that much of a racist or a bigot, then find another state,” he said. “Find a state where the minority population is 1 percent or whatever. It’s not that in Minnesota.” Dayton also made an economic argument that did not exactly fit the case of Third World immigrants who are themselves heavy consumers of welfare benefits. “Our economy cannot expand based on white, B+, Minnesota-born citizens. We don’t have enough,” he said. A trust-fund baby himself, Dayton was engaging in a classic case of projection. It was certainly not an invitation to debate.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Deep State on the Defensive James Clapper and complicit media push the narrative that FBI spying on Trump was a “good thing.” Lloyd Billingsley

By on May 24th, 2018

When candidate Donald Trump claimed his 2016 campaign had been the target of a spying campaign, the old-line establishment media reacted with derision. Since Trump’s 2016 victory, it has become more apparent that the spying was real, and part of an intelligence operation to exonerate Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton, frame the victorious president on fake charges of colluding with Russia, and ultimately drive him from office.

A key player for the previous administration is former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, who now holds forth on MSNBC. On Tuesday, Joy Behar asked Clapper if the FBI had been spying on the Trump campaign.

“No, they were not,” said Clapper, DNI from 2010-2017. “They were spying on, a term I don’t particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage or influence — which is what they do.”

Clapper also said, “With the informant business, well, the point here is the Russians. Not spying on the campaign but what are the Russians doing? And in a sense, unfortunately, what they were trying to do is protect our political system and protect the campaign.”

“Well,” Behar wondered, “why doesn’t he like that? He should be happy.”

Clapper agreed that “he should be,” but the president didn’t think so.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Naked is the Best Disguise: the Bipartisan Deep State By Michael Walsh

By on May 24th, 2018

One of the mysteries of the deep state is just how deep it is. Like the Kryptos sculpture in the courtyard of the Central Intelligence Agency, it has proven remarkably resistant to decoding since its emergence in the aftermath of World War II, after the creation of the CIA. It is, in a very real sense, its own cipher, hiding in plain sight all along and just daring the civilians to call it by its name: the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party.

As it happens, the leaders of the PBFP sat for a group portrait the other day. The occasion was the funeral of former First Lady Barbara Bush, wife of George Herbert Walker “Poppy” Bush and mother of George Walker Bush, American presidents 41 and 43, respectively. Also in the photograph was the man who beat Poppy, William Jefferson Blythe III, more commonly known as Bill Clinton; and Barack Hussein Obama II, also known as Barry Soetoro, the man who succeeded George W. Bush. And their wives, of course, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, former senator from New York, former secretary of state in the Obama Administration, and the defeated candidate in the 2016 presidential election.

But the man who defeated Hillary—Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States—was nowhere to be seen. The Bush family, which bears him no love after his demolition of heir-apparent Jeb in the 2016 Republican primaries, had made it clear that Trump would not be welcome in Houston. And so the Trump family was represented by First Lady Melania, while the president stayed behind in Washington under the fig leaf of protocol (presidents don’t normally attend first ladies’ funerals) and not wishing to “disrupt” the event.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

U.S. Has Leverage in Dealings with Iran and North Korea By Victor Davis Hanson

By on May 24th, 2018

There has been a lot of misinformation about both getting out of the so-called Iran deal and getting into a new North Korean agreement. The two situations may be connected, but not in the way we are usually told.

Getting out of the Iran deal did not destroy trust in the U.S. government. Our departure from the deal does not mean that North Korea cannot reliably negotiate with America.

In 2015, the Iran deal was not approved as either a Senate-ratified treaty or a joint congressional resolution. Had the deal been a treaty, President Donald Trump could not have walked away from it so easily and with so little downside.

Former President Obama knew that he did not have majority congressional support for his initiative. Therefore, he desperately sought ways to circumvent the constitutionally directed authority of the Senate and redefine a treaty as a mere executive order

Obama got the deal approved by the Iranians in part by paying them ransom for hostages through huge nighttime cash transfers.

A cynical North Korea knew only too well that in the past, President Obama either entered into agreements or avoided them based on his therapeutic notion that human nature was both changeable and essentially noble.

The North Koreans now seem worried that a more unpredictable Trump has a quite different, pessimistic and tragic view that humans are predictably capable of almost anything—if not strongly deterred.

After Trump’s rejection of the Iran deal, North Korea now concedes that it cannot cajole a flawed agreement with the current U.S. president, who is mercurial rather than scripted in his reactions.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Philip Roth, Yesterday’s Young American By Kyle Smith

By on May 24th, 2018

His later novels may be his most enduring, but future readers may shun even those, because of what they understand about who he was.

The reputations of novels and novelists wax and wane over time. Herman Melville died impecunious, and Moby-Dick didn’t begin to rise to the head of the canon until 30 years after he died. The Great Gatsby was not a great success until after F. Scott Fitzgerald died. Zora Neale Hurston died in obscurity in 1960, was rediscovered in the 1980s, and is now so revered that this spring’s publication of an 87-year-old Hurston manuscript was a literary event, and the book Barracoon today sits at number 2 on the New York Times bestseller list.

On the other hand, Norman Mailer was once the most famous novelist in America. As recently as 1991, publication of one of his books (Harlot’s Ghost) was major cultural news. His books sold hugely. His mantel groaned with the tonnage of his awards. He was a fixture on talk shows. No one who cared about books could fail to have an informed opinion about him, but even people who didn’t read books knew who he was. Today, if you stopped by the English department of an elite university and talked to the undergraduates, you’d have a hard time finding anyone who cares about Norman Mailer, just a decade after his death. Certainly you’d find students who have never heard of him. Norman Mailer is no longer important.

A similar fate may await Philip Roth. Before his death on Tuesday he was widely seen as America’s greatest living novelist. But will he be widely read in 30 years’ time, or even 20? I doubt it, although he may be saved by works that are among his least characteristic efforts.

Departed artists get subjected to a harsh, often unfair reductionism, and in Roth’s case a prodigious output — more than 30 books — will be collapsed into an unflattering assessment passed on from professors to curious undergraduates to less curious undergraduates. Roth, like many of his protagonists, will be described as a striver from the urban immigrant ghettos of the 1940s with a Holocaust-informed persecution complex and a ferocious, rageful lust. Roth, like Mailer, grew up in a culture that struck him as a prison of sexual convention and repression. Much of his writerly energy went into a frenzied, wailing hammering against those walls.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How the Clinton-Emails Investigation Intertwined with the Russia Probe By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on May 24th, 2018

Obama administration officials in the DOJ and FBI saw the cases as inseparably linked.

‘Cruz just dropped out of the race. It’s going to be a Clinton Trump race. Unbelievable.”

It was a little after midnight on May 4, 2016. FBI lawyer Lisa Page was texting her paramour, FBI counterespionage agent Peter Strzok, about the most stunning development to date in the 2016 campaign: Donald Trump was now the inevitable Republican nominee. He would square off against Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ certain standard-bearer.

The race was set . . . between two major-party candidates who were both under investigation by the FBI.

In stunned response, Strzok wrote what may be the only words we need to know, the words that reflected the mindset of his agency’s leadership and of the Obama administration: “Now the pressure really starts to finish MYE.”

MYE. That’s Mid-Year Exam, the code-word the FBI had given to the Hillary Clinton emails probe.

“It sure does,” responded Page. Mind you, she was not just any FBI lawyer; she was counsel and confidant to the bureau’s No. 2 official, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

If the thousands of text messages between Ms. Page and Agent Strzok are clear on anything, they are clear on the thinking of the bureau’s top brass.

In its Trump antipathy, the media-Democrat complex has admonished us to ignore the Strzok-Page texts. FBI officials are as entitled as anyone else to their political opinions, we’re told; and if they found Trump loathsome, they were no different from half the country.

That’s the wrong way to look at it. Regardless of their politics (which, the texts show, are not as left-wing as some conservative-media hyperbole claims), these FBI officials are a window into how the Obama administration regarded the two investigations in which Strzok and Page were central players: Mid Year Exam and Trump-Russia — the latter eventually code-named “Crossfire Hurricane.”

The two investigations must not be compartmentalized. Manifestly, the FBI saw them as inseparably linked: Trump’s victory in the primaries, the opening of his path to the Oval Office, meant — first and foremost — that the Hillary investigation had to be brought to a close.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left Waits for Godot—Er, Mueller ‘Resistance’ types crave impeachment desperately, but can’t be bothered to do much of anything about it. By Ted Rall

By on May 24th, 2018

Mr. Rall is a political cartoonist and author of “Francis: The People’s Pope,” the latest in a series of graphic-novel biographies.

On book tour in Ohio a few weeks ago, someone asked me if Donald Trump would finish out his term. The room was full of liberals and left-of-the-Democrats.

I pointed out that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats have said that they have no interest in impeachment even if their party wins back Congress. I predicted—with the usual caveats about the perils of political prognostication—that Mr. Trump would not only finish his term but win re-election, due to the divisions within the Democratic Party.

Loud gasps all around. Some people were so peeved—at me!—that I had to remind them: “I’m not a warlock. I don’t make anything happen.”

Many Democrats are surprised Mr. Trump has hung on this long. Magical thinking is legion on the left. A recent Rasmussen poll finds that 41% of Democrats believe the president will be impeached and removed from office by 2020—more than the 36% who think the voters will reject him in 2½ years.

But how would that happen? Despite its legal-linguistic trappings—“high crimes and misdemeanors,” “counts,” “hearings,” “trial”—impeachment is a political process. This GOP president has nothing existential to fear from this GOP Congress. Should a Big Blue Wave occur, Mrs. Pelosi’s plans don’t include divisive hearings—and even if Democrats won every Senate race, they’d still be well short of the two-thirds needed to remove Mr. Trump from office.

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