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October 2018

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Farrakhan: ‘I’m Not an Anti-Semite. I’m Anti-Termite’ By Rick Moran

By on October 18th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/farrakhan-im-not-an-anti-semite-im-anti-termite/

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan tweeted out to his 375,000 followers yesterday that he is not an anti-Semite.

Farrakhan helpfully explained that he just hates termites.

BuzzFeed:

The tweet appears to violate Twitter’s proposed new policies around “dehumanizing” tweets, defined in a company blog post as “language that treats others as less than human … Examples can include comparing groups to animals and viruses (animalistic), or reducing groups to a tool for some other purpose (mechanistic).”

However, a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the rules have not yet taken effect, so Farrakhan’s language is not in violation of any extant policy. The spokesperson did not give a date for when the new rule would go into effect, or if it would at all. He did not address whether Farrakhan’s tweet would be in violation were the policy in effect.

So Farrakhan’s hate on Twitter has essentially been grandfathered in. Apparently, even blatant hate speech was allowed under the “old” rules.

But also not allowed under the “old” rules — anything Twitter says is not allowed.

Stephen Green:

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Palestinians Do Not Have a Parliament by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on October 18th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13136/palestinian-parliament

In the absence of a parliament, the Palestinians have no address to express their grievances. They cannot write to or phone their elected legislators to complain about anything. All they can do is resort to social media, especially Facebook, to air their views.

As Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas does not tolerate criticism particularly well, he doubtless feels more comfortable delivering speeches at international forums such as the United Nations, the European Parliament and his own Fatah and PLO institutions than at the Palestinian parliament. The others are places where no one takes him to task for his tyranny.

In the past few years, scores of Palestinians have been harassed, arrested and interrogated by Abbas’s security forces for posting critical comments on Facebook.

Parliaments, among the strongest manifestations of a democracy, represent the electorate, enact laws and oversee the government through hearings and inquiries.

Apparently, this does not apply to the Palestinians, who, as a result of the power struggle between Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, have, for the past 11 years, been without a functioning parliament.

The Palestinian Authority’s unicameral legislature is the 132-member Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). Both the PA and PLC were established after the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993. The first Palestinian legislative election took place in January 1996. The second, and last, election took place in January 2006; it resulted in a victory for Hamas.

In 2007, Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip and toppled the Palestinian Authority regime that was there. Since then, the Palestinian parliament has not been functioning properly, although Hamas legislators sometimes meet separately in the Gaza Strip. In the absence of a functioning parliament, Abbas has been passing laws by “presidential decree.” Several Palestinians have questioned their legality and accused the Palestinian leader of violating Palestinian Basic Law.

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BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A martial nation needs Churchill to inspire us Daniel Johnson

By on October 17th, 2018

From Boadicea’s chariot to Britannia’s trident, the British have always been fond of martial metaphors. That is not the same as a “national obsession” with “war-worship”, which David Cameron’s former speechwriter Clare Foges, writing recently in The Times, blamed for “leading us to Brexit and the mess we are in”. She claims that our constant references to the Second World War and “the casual elision of evil bastards back then with earnest bureaucrats today” have “been poisonous to relations with Europe”. As evidence for this, Ms Foges cites the former German ambassador, Peter Ammon, who said that back in Berlin they could not believe that the British saw Germany as dominant in the EU, adding that “if you focus only on how Britain stood alone in the war, how it stood against dominating Germany, well, it is a nice story, but it does not solve any problem of today”.

For my own part, I find it revealing that someone so close to the prime minister who accidentally precipitated Brexit is still so naive about Germany’s role in the EU that she accepts such an artful gambit at face value. Mr Ammon knows perfectly well that his country’s political and economic (but not military) dominance in Europe is taken for granted by the elites of every one of the EU’s 28 member states, including his own. To admit as much in public would be a faux pas for a postwar German diplomat, but not for a British one: Sir Paul Lever, ambassador to Germany from 1997 to 2003, has written an entire book on the subject with the self-explanatory title Berlin Rules: Europe and the German Way. Sir Paul isn’t anti-German; he merely seeks to explain how the EU works. Only last month it emerged that Brussels broke its own rules by installing Martin Selmayr as Secretary-General of the European Commission. Will he now be removed from office? Of course not: Dr Selmayr is perhaps the most ardent living exponent of the ideology of European federalism, which has been an article of faith for every German chancellor since Adenauer and is now largely enshrined in EU law. Many Continental Europeans accept this fait accompli as the natural order of things. As far as they are concerned, Berlin rules OK.

What, though, about the war, and the part played in it by Britain — what Ambassador Ammon called “a nice story”? Is it really no more than that? Are we deluding ourselves with our habit of “war-wallowing”, to which Ms Foges cheerfully pleads guilty? Have we, in fact, constructed our entire national identity on the basis of a convenient untruth, a necessary fiction — or even a deliberate lie?

That, in a nutshell, is the argument of a new book by Peter Hitchens: The Phoney Victory: The World War II Delusion (IB Tauris, £17.99). Dedicated to his father, a Royal Navy commander, this white-hot polemic is intended to expose those who unnecessarily plunged the British people into a catastrophic war for which they were unprepared and for which they paid the price: a pyrrhic victory that bankrupted the economy, reduced a global empire to an American satellite and sacrificed much that had made Britain great.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard Admissions Dean Largely Ignored Report on Factors Affecting Asian-American Applicants Melissa Korn

By on October 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-admissions-dean-largely-ignored-report-on-factors-affecting-asian-american-applicants-153980665
A federal trial in Boston is putting Harvard’s admissions process to the test.

BOSTON—Were admission to Harvard based solely on academic merit, Asian-Americans would comprise 43% of the freshman class, while African-Americans would make up less than 1%, according to an internal Harvard report discussed at a trial here Wednesday.

Lawyers representing a nonprofit that has sued the school alleging intentional discrimination against Asian-American applicants dug deep into the internal 2013 study in court. In the process, they highlighted whether some criteria Harvard uses to assess candidates put Asian-American candidates at a disadvantage and how little the admissions dean did with the data when he received the report five years ago.

U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs will decide after the three-week trial whether Harvard’s admissions practices violate federal civil-rights law.
Crafting a ClassPercentage of admitted students by race/ethnicity, based on Harvard’s internal simulations in 2013Source: Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research report, shown by Students for Fair Admissions at trialNote: Simulation includes numbers from 2007-16 class years.
WhiteAsianBlackHispanicNative AmericanInternationalUnknownAcademics onlyAcademics, athletes/legacyAcademics, athletes/legacy andpersonal/extracurricularActual0%20406080100

The internal study, conducted by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research and labeled as preliminary, simulated what the admitted class would look like depending on which factors Harvard’s admissions office considered. The upshot: Asian-Americans fared best when the class was crafted based on academics alone. The share of Asian-Americans shrinks to 31.4% when recruited athletes and the children of Harvard graduates are factored in. When extracurricular and personal ratings also come into play, the share of Asian-Americans drops to 26%.

Asian-Americans were the only racial or ethnic group to see a decrease in their projected class representation with the inclusion of extra-curriculars and personal ratings.

Most elite schools consider a range of factors when determining admissions, in part because most applicants have stellar grades and test scores and are relatively indistinguishable on academics alone. The schools say they look at candidates in a holistic manner to ensure they have a good mix of students from different backgrounds, who can then learn from one another inside and outside the classroom.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Lance Morrow:We’ve Grown Accustomed to Trump Even progressives treat the president as a familiar monster. And he hasn’t destroyed the world yet.

By on October 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/weve-grown-accustomed-to-trump-1539815943

It’s hard to prove intangibles, harder still when they are in motion, like October clouds, moving rapidly across millions of minds.

One obvious but neglected intangible is worth noticing in the weeks before the elections: The country—consciously or unconsciously—has gotten used to Donald Trump. Twenty-one months into his administration, Mr. Trump has been processed, or half-processed—even subtly domesticated—by the large, complicated American mind, which is improvisational and on the whole incoherent except in moments of national crisis.

Even progressives to whom he is a monster treat him now as, at least, a familiar monster, another of the many disruptive, destructive realities of the 21st century. Life is a matter of learning to live with monsters. Mr. Trump hasn’t destroyed the world yet, as his enemies predicted he would.

In fact, life goes on, much for the better in many neighborhoods. To progressives this is disconcerting—anticlimactic. The market is up. Unemployment is way down. North and South Korea are talking. The Mueller thing goes on and on, but who knows about that? It’s off the screen for the moment.

These days, you only rarely see those psychiatric manifestoes on Facebook and Twitter claiming that the man is psychotic or infantile. They were common in the first year of Mr. Trump’s presidency but the diagnosis loses its force when a voter reflects how psychotic and infantile the culture itself has become. Mr. Trump’s peculiarities don’t seem unusual when compared with the extreme bizarreness, not to say pathology, that is routine on the left.

People get used to the strangest things, once the novelty has passed. Same-sex marriage, a preposterous idea not long ago, is almost everywhere accepted. The world adjusts to new conditions and factors in the Kabuki of opposition and ridicule. A monster may become a cartoon—the Tasmanian Devil. Alec Baldwin’s (never quite accurate) impersonation on “Saturday Night Live” has become part of the Trump routine now. People laugh, or they don’t laugh, but either way, they get up Sunday morning and go about their lives.

Among progressives, contempt for Mr. Trump is an article of faith and hardly worth mentioning anymore at a dinner party. If you are dining with like-minded people, it’s boring to go on and on about the president; if those around the table disagree about him, it seems best to avoid politics altogether.

Americans have given up trying to persuade one another, I suspect. Either their adrenaline is spent, or else they know from experience how dangerous the Trump-stirred passions are—how deeply enraged friends may become at friends, what carnage the spasms of emotion may cause. One tires of politics as road rage. Plenty of people remain almost crazy with anger, and the country’s political and cultural forces overall remain centrifugal, driving people to extremes. Yet civilizing and mitigating countercurrents are at work beneath the surface.

The Kavanaugh confirmation fight clarified many Republican minds in advance of the midterm elections. It half-reconciled even many Never Trumpers to a president who has been so little to their moral or aesthetic taste. They have been driven toward Donald Trump by the Jacobin performance of the left, starting with the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee and spilling into the streets among the Maxine Waters and George Soros Brigades. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Origins of Progressive Agony By Victor Davis Hanson

By on October 17th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/progressive-agony-democrats-brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court/

In the wake of Obama, the Democratic party was a shipwreck, to be saved only by Hillary and the Supreme Court . . .

What has transformed the Democratic party into an anguished progressive movement that incorporates the tactics of the street, embraces maenadism, reverts to Sixties carnival barking, and is radicalized by a new young socialist movement? Even party chairman Tom Perez concedes that there are “no moderate Democrats left,” and lately the rantings of Cory Booker, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez confirm that diagnosis.

Obama, the Fallen God

Paradoxically, Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 and 2012 and yet helped to erode the old Democratic party in the process. He ended up in opulent retirement while ceding state legislatures, governorships, the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court to conservative Republicans.

Obama had promised leftists — in his prior brief tenure in the Senate he had compiled the most partisan record of his 99 colleagues — that his social-justice methods and agendas would lead to a proverbial “permanent Democratic majority.” Do we remember the February 2009 Newsweek obsequious cover story “We Are All Socialists Now”?

Supposedly, changing demography, massive illegal immigration, and identity politics had preordained a permanent 51 percent “Other” whose minority statuses, as defined by gender and race, had now become a majority, given the destined demise of the white working classes. If Obama had not existed, someone like Corey Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, or Kirsten Gillibrand was supposedly foreordained to be president anyway.

But while Obama sermonized about our predestined “arc of history” and how its moral curve bent this way and that, he managed to lose both his supermajority in the Senate and the House itself by 2011. By 2015, the Senate lost its Democratic majority.

Ruling by pen-and-phone executive order only took the country more leftward. And it came at the price of stagnating the economy, acerbating social, cultural, and racial differences, raising taxes, and recalibrating foreign policy.

Obama bequeathed to his successors neither a popular progressive record nor a robust economy nor a stellar foreign-policy success. If he did ensure massive minority voting registration and bloc voting, that served largely himself — and came at the cost of alienating independents and the working classes. In other words, Obama most certainly did pass on to his successors the downside of his polarizing sermonizing and divisiveness, but not the upside of record minority turnout and uniform voting.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel: Accelerating Global Cybersecurity Innovation By Chuck Brooks

By on October 17th, 2018

https://cyberstartupobservatory.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Observatory-Israel_Fourth_Edition-October_2018.pdf
Last year, Tom Bossert, former White House homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, disclosed the new partnership to combat cyberattacks during remarks at an annual cybersecurity conference in Tel Aviv.

“These high-level meetings represent the first step in strengthening bilateral ties on cyber issues following President Trump’s visit to Israel,” Bossert said at Cyber Week 2017, according to Reuters. “The agility Israel has in developing solutions will innovate cyber defenses that we can test here and bring back to America,” the White House aide continued. “Perfect security may not be achievable but we have within our reach a safer and more secure Internet.”

The strengthening of the U.S.-Israel partnership makes great sense on many levels including the rate of investments, collaboration and technical capabilities, government support, and resourcefulness.

The New York data firm CB Insights notes that Israel, the country with the world’s 100th-largest population, signed the second-largest number of cybersecurity deals internationally last year. And according to a report published by Startup Nation, investors poured a record-breaking $815 million into the Israeli cyber ecosystem in 2017, totaling some 16% of all global investment in the cybersecurity industry, despite Israelis making up only about 0.1% of the world population. The report states that “Individual hackers are now armed with state-level cyberattack capabilities.”

According to YL Ventures, the global cybersecurity incursions of 2017 illuminated the continuing role that innovation plays in information security and defense. They believe that Israeli startups will continue in 2018 to leverage the immense pool of local talent to build comprehensive solutions addressing global markets.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

ISIS Targeting Water Supplies, Power Lines and Cell Towers By Bridget Johnson

By on October 17th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/isis-targeting-water-supplies-power-lines-and-cell-towers/

ARLINGTON, Va. — ISIS is proving to be a “very elusive enemy” in its remaining strongholds in Syria as forces on the ground battle against omnipresent booby traps and a network of jihadist tunnels, and in Iraq where jihadists are tampering with water supplies.

Via video from Baghdad today, Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman Col. Sean Ryan was asked why the Syrian Democratic Forces’ Operation Roundup, intended to clear ISIS fighters from the Middle Euphrates River Valley, seemed to be moving at a glacial pace compared to the seizure of ISIS’ capital, Raqqa.

“Raqqa and Mosul, that’s house-to-house fighting, to where this whole area is deserty area, it’s thousands of miles long. So it takes a long time,” Ryan replied. “ISIS has also been using underground tunnels, as we’ve mentioned before. And they are a very elusive enemy, there’s no doubt about. But when they’re underground, it’s very difficult.”

“I think the SDF is making very good ground right now. It just takes a long time,” he added. “And also, you have to remember, ISIS has booby-trapped and IED’d almost every area in there, to where you just can’t go rushing into these areas and clear them. You have to have the equipment and the manpower to do that. And often when you start the clearing, your equipment gets damaged when IEDs go off. So there’s not an, you know, unlimited supply of vehicles that they can use. They have to, you know, get resupplied.”

Ryan said when the SDF asks the coalition for something, “we are usually able to deliver it.”

Asked why U.S. officials have noted for many months that only 2 percent of the original caliphate still is controlled by ISIS, but that 2 percent has not been regained, Ryan replied that “it’s not about the land mass, it’s about taking away ISIS capabilities.”

“It’s not just killing ISIS fighters, it’s taking away their weapons systems, taking away their logistical support and things of that nature. So that’s happening every day,” he said.

Also, he added, “they had planned on this four years ago; they knew that they were probably going to end up in this area.”

“With the tunnels they have underneath and the tunnels that the oil companies left with food and supplies, they’re able to sustain.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Haley: U.S. Will ‘Continually’ Remind UN That Palestinians Aren’t ‘Any State at All’ By Bridget Johnson

By on October 17th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/haley-u-s-will-continually-remind-un-that-palestinians-arent-any-state-at-all/

The Palestinian Authority won a Tuesday vote to lead the G77 group of developing countries at the United Nations, while the United States said no such move could be supported because no Palestinian state has been admitted as a member state.

As the PA leads the G77 next year, though, it will essentially be acting like a full UN member.

The United States, Israel and Australia voted against the PA’s chairmanship, while 146 countries voted in favor, 15 abstained, and 29 countries didn’t vote.

“Australia’s decision to vote no on this resolution reflects our long-standing position that Palestinian attempts to seek recognition as a state in international fora are deeply unhelpful to efforts towards a two-state solution,” Australian UN Ambassador Gillian Bird told the General Assembly.

Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the UN Jonathan Cohen said that the U.S. “cannot support efforts by the Palestinians to enhance their status outside of direct negotiations.”

“The United States does not recognize that there is a Palestinian state and notes that no such state has been admitted as a UN Member State. Therefore, we strongly oppose the Palestinian election as Chair of the G77, as well as this so-called enabling resolution,” he said.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Swift Iran Decision Iranian banks have to be expelled from the global financing network.

By on October 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-not-so-swift-diplomacy-1539730896

Another trans-Atlantic showdown is looming as the Trump Administration prepares its next tranche of financial sanctions on Iran, and the puzzle is why Europe keeps backing itself into a corner. Brussels and European Union states seem ready to stage a battle with Washington over an obscure but important financial-service network—against Europe’s own interests.

The looming brouhaha concerns Swift, the Belgium-based cooperative that manages the global system that banks use to communicate with each other for cross-border transactions. The Trump Administration will soon lay out its plans for financial sanctions on Tehran to take effect in November, as Washington reintroduces sanctions lifted under the Obama Administration’s 2015 nuclear deal. One question is whether the new sanctions include Swift.

They will have to in order to be effective, because cutting Iran off from Swift’s services is one of the best ways to ensure that financial sanctions bite. Were Swift to sever ties with Iranian banks, Iranian companies and financial institutions would struggle to transfer money to and from the rest of the world.

Alternatives exist, but none offer Swift’s global reach or security. Europe’s much-vaunted “special-purpose vehicle” for trading around U.S. financial sanctions, announced last month, is expected to be little more than a glorified barter arrangement with limited scope.

Swift is particularly prone to U.S. pressure because the American financial system looms so large in the world. Swift’s board includes representatives of European and American banks, and many messages across its network travel to or from the U.S. Some Europeans believe Washington wields too much influence over a network they think should operate on a multilateral consensus like a financial EU.

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