Displaying posts published in

February 2019

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Not Quite the Religion of PeaceBernie Power

By on February 6th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/02/not-quite-the-religion-of-peace/

When sentencing a pair of jihadis, a NSW judge observed that the Islamic community needs to work out if Koranic exortations to violence are to be taken seriously or not. Predictably, there followed immediate denials that anything needs to change or, indeed, could be changed. It seems Islamic leaders could use a refresher course in their creed’s most sacred text.

NSW Supreme Court Justice Des Fagan recently incurred the wrath of Muslim leaders for suggesting that Muslims need to disavow the “belligerent” verses in the Koran. Sentencing a young couple who had planned a terrorist attack, Fagan noted:

“Terrorists’ reliance on verses of the Koran to support an Islamic duty of religious violence has been seen with more or less clarity in a number of NSW and Victorian cases. If the verses upon which the terrorists rely are not binding commands of Allah, it is Muslims who would have to say so.”[1]

The Muslim reaction has been predictable. The Grand Mufti of Australia, Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, insisted there only two verses of the Koran talk about pre-emptive fighting.[2] In a classic red-herring strategy, Australian Muslim Women’s Association president Ms Silmi Ihram weighed in: “There are very few verses in the Koran that can be twisted for violent purposes, there are a lot more in other scriptures.”

One wonders if these two have been reading the same book as their jihadist co-religionists.

Admittedly the Koran is a hard read. It is not in chronological order, nor is it organized by content or theme. The text jumps from one topic to another without notice or explanation. The absence of background markers is remarkable. There are no dates or times at all. Few places are identified: Mecca and Yathrib (the earlier name for Medina ‘the city’) are mentioned only once each. Muhammad’s name occurs only four times. The Koran is, overall, a chaotic jumble of a book without context. In the absence of a commentary or the hadith, it is difficult to make sense of it.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Warren Apologizes for Identifying as ‘American Indian’ on Texas Bar Application By Jack Crowe

By on February 6th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/warren-apologizes-for-identifying-as-american-indian-on-texas-bar-application/

Senator Elizabeth Warren apologized Wednesday for identifying herself as an “American Indian” on her application to the State Bar of Texas when confronted about the document by reporters on Capitol Hill.

Warren, who apologized earlier this month to the Cherokee Nation for publicizing the results of a DNA test in an attempt to corroborate her claims of Native American ancestry, explained that “family stories” informed her sense of her identity, but conceded that she failed to respect tribal sovereignty when claiming that identity in her professional life.

“This was about thirty years ago and I am not a tribal citizen. Tribes and only tribes determine citizenship. When I was growing up in Oklahoma, I learned about my family the same way most people do. My brothers and I learned from our moms and dads and brother and sisters, and those were our family stories.” Warren said. “There really is an important distinction of tribal citizenship. I am not a member of the tribe and I have apologized for not being more sensitive to that distinction.”

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fairfax Accuser Describes Alleged Sexual Assault in Graphic Statement By Jack Crowe

By on February 6th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fairfax-accuser-describes-sexual-assault-in-graphic-statement/

Vanessa Tyson released a statement Wednesday describing for the first time in graphic detail the sexual assault she alleges she suffered at the hands of Virginia lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax.

Tyson, an associate professor of politics at Scripps College in California, claims Fairfax lured her to his hotel room during the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004 and, once she was there, forced her to perform oral sex on him against her will — a charge Fairfax has vigorously and repeatedly denied:

I stood in the entryway of the room and after he located the documents, he walked over and kissed me. Although surprised by his advance, it was not unwelcome and I kissed him back. He then took my hand and pulled me towards the bed. I was fully clothed in a pantsuit and had no intention of taking my clothes off or engaging in sexual activity. In the back of my mind, I also knew I needed to return to Convention headquarters.

What began as consensual kissing quickly turned into a sexual assault. Mr. Fairfax put his hand behind my neck and forcefully pushed my head towards his crotch. Only then did I realize that he had unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and taken out his penis. He then forced his penis into my mouth. Utterly shocked and terrified, I tried to move my head away, but could not because his hand was holding down my neck and he was much stronger than me. As I cried and gagged, Mr. Fairfax forced me to perform oral sex on him. I cannot believe, given my obvious distress, that Mr. Fairfax thought this forced sexual act was consensual. To be very clear, I did not want to engage in oral sex with Mr. Fairfax and I never gave any form of consent. Quite the opposite. I con

Continue reading →
IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Against The Evidence, Media Keeps Insisting Terrorists Aren’t Crossing The Southern Border The Times is somewhere between misleading by omission and outright lying to their readers about the threats posed by lack of border security. By Todd Bensman

By on February 6th, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/06/the-nyt-is-lying-to-readers-about-immigration-threats-from-muslim-world/

Much of the noise accompanying President Trump’s partial justification for a wall concerns the veracity of a general threat: that Islamist terror travelers in the flow of “special interest aliens” (SIAs) might easier breach the southern border without one.

Critics in the media vehemently argue that the administration is trafficking in ridiculous, baseless fearmongering. After President Trump said Muslim prayer rugs were intercepted at the border, one Vox article said migration from Muslim-majority countries only happened at “vanishingly small rates.” Another, in The Washington Post, called southern border migration from Muslim countries a “conspiracy theory.”

But perhaps the most influentially misleading article on the subject came from The New York Times. On January 18, The Times published a “Fact Check” column by Linda Qiu titled “Trump’s Baseless Claim About Prayer Rugs Found at the Border.” It essentially concluded that migration from Muslim-majority countries is an unproven conspiracy theory and, even if it did happen, no one could consider it a security threat.

The column contained numerous errors and inaccurately cited two government reports to support the story’s weak contentions. This sort of recurring problem in the media must finally be called out.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Atlantic Writer Tweets Trump Assassination Fantasy By Madeline Osburn

By on February 6th, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/06/atlantic-writer-tweets-trump-assassination-fantasy/

Jemelle Hill, staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote a mini fan fiction on Twitter during the State of the Union Tuesday night, about the assassination of President Trump with the help of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Hill tweeted that Ocasio-Cortez should yell, “GETCHO HAND OUT MY POCKET,” during the president’s State of the Union speech. The phrase “Get your hand outta my pocket!” was the same one yelled in the Manhattan Audubon Ballroom in 1965 as a distraction before the murder of Malcolm X. As the room tried to quell the commotion, another man rushed forward and shot Malcolm X in the chest.

The same assassination scene was depicted here:

The Atlantic’s motto since it was founded in 1857 has been “Of no party or clique.” The magazine insists it is a place for ideas across the political spectrum. Yet last year Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg hired then immediately fired conservative writer Kevin Williamson on the grounds that his views on abortion would make other Atlantic employees feel unsafe. Williamson thinks abortion is murder, a standard position for those who affirm that human life begins at conception.

It is hard to see how both of these things can be true: that the Atlantic is “of no party or clique” and that they don’t hire any individuals who make other employees feel unsafe. Hill’s fantasy about the president’s assassination would surely make any employee who supports President Trump feel unsafe — if The Atlantic indeed has any such employees.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Donald Trump chooses greatness — and so should we SOTU 2019 had a fuller agenda of things to be done and a more circumspect and humble offer to the other side of the aisle Roger Kimball

By on February 6th, 2019

https://spectator.us/donald-trump-state-union-greatness/

Donald Trump is not always as charming as P.G. Wodehouse. Nevertheless, his magnificent State of the Union Address tonight put me in mind of this remark from the preface of Plum’s great novel Summer Lightning: ‘A certain critic,’ Wodehouse wrote, ‘made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained “all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.”’ Waxing utopian, Wodehouse wondered whether, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha, that critic had by now been eaten by bears. Had he survived, though, said critic would not be able to make the same complaint about Summer Lightning. ‘With my superior intelligence,’ Wodehouse gloated, I have outgeneraled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names.’

So, mutatis very much mutandis, did the president do tonight. SOTU 2019 bears a marked similarity to SOTU 2018. There was the same reaching across the aisle, the effort, as I put it last year, to restore the first person plural in American civic discourse, a ‘We’ that Democrats and Republicans and Independents could alike affirm.

Last year, the president spoke of putting aside the partisan passions that divide us in order to go forward as a people united in pursuing the goal of making a better America.

This year, he echoed that, noting that the choice before us was the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution, on the one hand, and cooperation, compromise, and the common good, on the other. ‘Victory,’ he said ‘is not winning for our party. Victory is winning for our country.’ Sounds good to me. Nancy, Chuck, what do you think?

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: THE STATE OF THE UNION IS DISMAL BUT THERE IS HOPE

By on February 6th, 2019

Everything that makes America great is challenged- our educational standards, our national language and culture, our porous borders and homeland security, the ability to debate without rancor and insult, and there is a pernicious hatred of capitalism and wealth without which there would be no support for all our scientific, philanthropic, and cultural institutions.

President Trump is no great orator, but he is a straight shooter and that is why I continue to support him. I liked his speech, and it pleased me that our national leader is confronting the serious issues that plague our nation. I admire his “cool” in spite of the smirks of Pelosi and Schumer and the street theater Democrat damsels in white. His rousing promise that America will never succumb to Socialism gave me hope.

The reply by sore loser Stacy Abrams was pure boilerplate Trump bashing with hyperbole and nothing to recommend. rsk

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Tower Collusion Storyline Backfires By Julie Kelly

By on February 6th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/05/trump-

It could be the most investigated and costliest 20-minute meeting in political history. I’m talking, of course, about the infamous June 9, 2016 encounter between top Trump campaign associates—including the president’s son and namesake—and Russian surrogates. The prodigious amount of time and energy devoted to analyzing that brief confab, which allegedly represented the vertex of the Kremlin and Team Trump, never will be fully tallied.

The “official” narrative about the Trump Tower meeting goes like this: Don Jr. met with Russians connected to the Kremlin to get dirt on Hillary Clinton a few months before the election. He spoke with his father before and after the meeting; even though the Russians didn’t reveal any scuttlebutt about Clinton, the mere fact Don Jr. arranged the meeting is evidence of criminal collusion with Vladimir Putin’s regime to influence the outcome of the presidential election.

The Trump Tower meeting has been probed by Congress and the special counsel’s office for months while pundits and lawmakers insist that Don Jr.’s participation in the meeting somehow amounts to a crime that will result in his imminent arrest. Mysterious phone calls made by Don Jr. around the time of the meeting were said to have been between father and son, further proof that Putin and Trump were in cahoots before Election Day. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) seems disturbingly fixated on the president’s son, threatening to keep investigating all of Don Jr.’s communications related to the meeting.

But now, to the chagrin of Democrats and the news media, that story line is falling apart. And with it, so is much of the Trump-Russia collusion fable.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

DEMSKKK.CON As Hillary Clinton’s mentor Robert Byrd confirms, Democrat outrage over Klan connections is a new development. Lloyd Billingsley

By on February 6th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272781/demskkkcon-lloyd-billingsley

Virginia governor Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, had barely finished publicly touting infanticide last week when a page from his 1984 medical school yearbook suddenly went viral. The page showed a photo of a man in blackface standing beside a man in a Ku Klux Klan robe. The Virginia Democrat acknowledged he was one of the men but didn’t say which. Northam then denied that he was in the photo but acknowledged he once darkened his face to look like Michael Jackson. Northam apologized for his actions and Democrats were divided about how to respond.

As CNN reported, “Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner refrained from calling on him to resign,” but freshman Virginia Democrat Rep. Elaine Luria called for Northam to step down. Sen. Kamala Harris, a candidate for president, declare “the stain of racism should have no place in the halls of government” and called for Northam to step aside. So did former vice president Joe Biden, who said “Northam has lost all moral authority.” As the career of another prominent Democrat shows, this type of outrage is a new development.

West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, a mentor to Hillary Clinton, served in the U.S. Senate for a record 51 years, and as Senate majority leader from 1977-1981 and 1987-1989. Before election to the Senate in 1958, Byrd served six years in Congress. And before that, he served as a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1942, Byrd formed a new Klan chapter in Sophia, West Virginia, and in 1944 wrote to segregationist Senator Theodore Bilbo, Mississippi Democrat, “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.” Byrd rose to the rank of Exalted Cyclops and in 1946, wrote to the Klan’s Grand Wizard, “The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state in the nation.”

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Freezing out the climate charlatans By Alex Alexiev

By on February 6th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/freezing_out_the_climate_charlatans.html

As I started writing this on the balmy, increasingly socialist left coast on January 27th, the U.S. media were full of dire predictions of a catastrophic cold snap in the Midwest and New England. The same day, in Brussels, 70,000 people (35,000 of them clueless schoolchildren) demonstrated with slogans like “Winter is not coming anymore,” “Nature grows, capitalism blows” and “Stop denying the earth is dying.”

Alas, Winter did come to both the Midwest and Europe and did so with a vengeance. At least 21 people have died of hypothermia in the U.S. so far, and at least 10 in Poland. Temperatures dipped to a hellish minus 23 degrees Fahrenheit (-30.5 Celsius) in Chicago, and minus 14 degrees Celsius (7 F) in Poland. Eleven U.S. states recorded temperatures lower than –14 F, or below those measured north of the Arctic Circle in Barrow, Alaska.

More to the point, as Powerlineblog’s John Hinderaker tells us in a perceptive piece, the deep freeze affecting his home state of Minnesota has much to tell us about the futility of green energy as the putative panacea of global warming doom. It turns out that as Minnesotans were freezing, renewable energy was nowhere to be found. The wind wasn’t blowing and in the entire MISO area (15 states in the Midwest and the South) it generated a measly 4% of the energy and operated at a miserable 24% of installed capacity, prompting Hinderaker to ask pointedly “why do we need wind farms”? Why indeed? To answer this question, it is worth delving into some of the other figures Hinderaker provides.

Continue reading →