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March 2019

POLITICS Comments turned off

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Rashida? By Michael Walsh

By on March 14th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/13/how-do-you-solve

“The left has forged an alliance of convenience with the more respectable elements of Islamic activists in the West in order to attack their common enemy, Western Civilization.”

Upon her accession to the U.S. House of Representatives last fall, practically the first words out of Rashida Tlaib’s mouth were: “We’re going to go in there and we’re going to impeach the motherf—er.” The object of the freshman Michigan Democrat’s derision was, of course, President Trump. This sentiment naturally got whoops and cheers from the guests at a MoveOn.org reception, who were there to celebrate the election of the Muslima from Dearbornistan, one of two female followers of Mohammed—the other is Ilhan Omar—now occupying chairs in the Capitol.

The triumphalism was multi-layered: not only had the Democrats—thanks, Paul Ryan!—retaken the House by both hook (free stuff for everybody except old toxic-male white guys, served up piping hot by the media) and crook (ballot harvesting in California that delivered once solidly Republican Orange County over to the Democrats) but, in the guise of “diversity,” they had also put two more co-religionists of the 9/11 hijackers into the Congress. Tlaib and Omar have wasted no time in getting to work against American norms and the republic itself.

Omar, born in Mogadishu, has been getting most of the attention lately; her unfiltered mouth can’t help but spout anti-Semitic drivel, and a recent attempt by a flailing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to rein her via a resolution against Jew hatred wound up as a boilerplate denunciation of “bigotry”—thus handing Omar a propaganda victory. As Britain’s hard-left Guardian put it in a headline: “Everyone’s against bigotry, right? Not 23 House Republicans, apparently.” Well played.

But Tlaib may be the more dangerous of the pair, cannily redoubling efforts to blame some (Jewish) Democrats’ antipathy to Omar’s casual slurs on . . . you guessed it: “I think Islamophobia is very much among the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party. And I know that’s hard for people to hear, but there’s only been four members of Congress that are of Muslim faith. Three of them currently serve in this institution. More of us need to get elected, but more of us need to understand as we come into this institution that I have a lot of work to do with my colleagues.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Waging War Against the Dead By Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 14th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/13

The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past.

In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam.

In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Muhammad.

The West prides itself in the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again.

In the last two years there has been a rash of statue toppling throughout the American South, aimed at wiping out memorialization of Confederate heroes. The pretense is that the Civil War can only be regarded as tragic in terms of the present oppression of the descendants of Southern slaves—154 years after the extinction of the Confederate states.

There is also a renewed crusade to erase the memory of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. Los Angeles removed a Columbus statue in November based on the premise that his 1492 discovery of the Americas began a disastrous genocide in the Western Hemisphere.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Reeling From Crisis to Crisis, Britain’s May Is Still Standing Prime Minister Theresa May has survived one political disaster after another despite losing crucial votes and ministers at an astounding rate By Max Colchester

By on March 14th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/reeling-from-crisis-to-crisis-britains-may-is-still-standing-11552502536

LONDON-—Prime Minister Theresa May has faced one political disaster after another, losing crucial votes and ministers at a rate not seen in British politics for decades.

Yet she’s still standing.

An extraordinary combination of factors means that despite regular drubbings in parliament, a rolling rebellion among her own cabinet and a flagship Brexit plan that was overwhelmingly rejected for a second time on Tuesday, the 62-year-old continues to hold on to power.

“Normally a leader will at some point confess the game is up,” said Mark Garnier, a Conservative Party lawmaker and former minister. “The party is slightly shocked.”

At the heart of this survival act: a fear among Conservative Party lawmakers about who would replace her.

Ousting Mrs. May could result in a Conservative leader who might take Brexit in a different direction, either forcing a much deeper break from the trading bloc or keeping the country much more closely bound to the European Union.

It could also trigger an election increasing the chance of a hard-left Labour Party coming into power. So Conservative lawmakers, worried that Brexit might suddenly get more radical or not happen at all, are sitting on their hands.

“Nobody wants to mess with this,” said a prominent Conservative euroskeptic. For Conservative party officials to force a change of leader in the midst of Brexit negotiations “seems crazier even than everything else,” said Tony Travers, professor at the London School of Economics.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Terror-Connected Lawyer Running for City Commission in Florida A dire warning to all potential voters. Joe Kaufman

By on March 14th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273088/terror-connected-lawyer-running-city-commission-joe-kaufman

When visiting Khurrum Wahid’s Facebook page, you see photos of what appears to be a clean-cut politician attending different events, posing with important politicos, standing with young people, and smiling broadly for the camera. Wahid is running for the position of City Commissioner of Coral Springs, Florida, and his Facebook page has been manufactured to show the perfect candidate for the public’s view. What is hidden behind this façade, though, is Wahid’s history – and present – of his involvement in radical Islam. It is this other side of Wahid that the voters need to recognize, so that they do not make a huge mistake come Election Day.

On June 18th, a ‘Special Election’ will be held for Coral Springs City Commission, Seat 2. The former Commissioner, Dan Daley, has left the seat vacant – following his win in a State House Special Election – and is heading to the Florida State Legislature, in Tallahassee. One of the individuals vying for his Commission seat is Khurrum Wahid. A February photo of Wahid, on his Facebook candidate page, has him posing with Daley and another recent candidate for Florida State House, Imtiaz Mohammad, who in December, slammed America and her citizens, saying “America [is] run on hate” and “American people are the most uneducated nation in the world.” Mohammad was part of a ‘host committee’ for a February fundraising event for Wahid.

Khurrum Basir Wahid is a Pakistani-born South Florida attorney, who has built his name on representing high profile terrorists. His past clients include: Rafiq Sabir, who received a 25-year prison sentence for conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaeda; al-Qaeda operative Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who received a life sentence for plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush; Sami al-Arian, who sought to create a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) infrastructure within the Tampa, Florida-area; and Miami imam Hafiz Khan, who was convicted of sending $50,000 to the Pakistani Taliban with the intent to murder American troops overseas.

According to the Miami New Times, Wahid himself was placed on a federal terrorist watch list in 2011. The publication states, “[S]ometimes, a clash between his work and personal life is inescapable. Last year, he landed on a federal ‘selectee’ list – a terrorist watch list. Now he gets a pat down at the airport before flying and can’t print boarding passes at home.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ISIS Spokesman: ‘What’s Our Crime? We Just Wanted to Apply Sharia.’ And what could possibly be wrong with that? March 14, 2019 Robert Spencer

By on March 14th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273144/isis-spokesman-whats-our-crime-we-just-wanted-robert-spencer

In a new video, an Islamic State (ISIS) spokesman named Abu Abd al-Azeem, “whose speech,” noted Reuters, “is peppered with Koranic recitations,” complained about the bad rap his cuddly group has gotten. “Why are we bombed by planes,” he asked plaintively, “why do all the nations of the unbelieving world come together to fight us?…What is our guilt? What is our crime? We (just) wanted to apply the sharia of Allah.”

Indeed. And now, in light of that statement, here are some questions that mainstream counterterror analysts should ponder deeply: did the Islamic State actually apply Sharia? ISIS is routinely dismissed as un-Islamic, but what exactly did they do that cannot be backed up by specific citations from the Qur’an and Hadith? And if the Islamic State just wanted to apply Sharia, and Sharia is entirely benign and compatible with Western values, as Western analysts also regularly insist, then why did the whole world regard the Islamic State as a criminal entity that must be destroyed? Why was it not welcomed into the family of nations, alongside other Sharia regimes including Saudi Arabia and Iran?

The cognitive dissonance arises, of course, from the assurances we received from the likes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, David Cameron, and virtually every other authority in the Western world that the Islamic State was not Islamic, and indeed, had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam.

This reached absurd levels during the Obama administration. “ISIL does not operate in the name of any religion,” said Obama’s Deputy State Department spokesperson Marie Harf in August 2014. “The president has been very clear about that, and the more we can underscore that, the better.” Yet Abu Abd al-Azeem’s words above make it abundantly clear, as does every other statement ever issued by ISIS, that the group believes itself to be operating in the name of Islam, and indeed, to embody the fullness of Islamic teaching. In June 2014, a video circulated of a masked Islamic State commander telling a cheering crowd: “By Allah, we embarked on our Jihad only to support the religion of Allah….Allah willing, we will establish a state ruled by the Quran and the Sunna….All of you honorable Muslims are the soldiers of the Muslim State.” He promised that the Islamic State would establish “the Sharia of Allah, the Quran, and the Sunna” as the crowed repeatedly responded with screams of “Allahu akbar.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The NeverTrump Bitter-Enders Still functioning as a fifth column for the progressive “resistance.” Bruce Thornton

By on March 14th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273095/nevertrump-bitter-enders-bruce-thornton

As Trump enters his third year of office, some Republican NeverTrumpers have gotten control of the symptoms of Trumpophobia, and have settled for the occasional snarky asides to maintain their anti-Trump bona fides while they write about serious issues rather than Trump’s alleged crypto-fascist assault on “democratic norms.” Others, however, have become bitter-enders, still clinging to the hope that Trump will be impeached or weakened enough to lose in 2020, thus sanctifying their irrational hatred of the best and most effective champion that conservatism is likely to find these days.

But make no mistake, no matter how seemingly marginalized or absurd, the bitter-enders are still functioning as a fifth column for the progressive “resistance,” providing a “conservative” and “bipartisan” cover for the Democrats’ rush to move America farther to the left in order to change our Constitutional Republic into a socialist technocracy.

Some of these bitter-enders have retreated into a left-wing financed, online redoubt they call The Bulwark, the motto of which is “conserving conservatism.” But that sentiment is hard to square with the editors’ decision to send evangelical pro-choice blogger Molly Jong-Fast to CPAC shortly after the Democrats in New York gleefully legalized infanticide. As Jim Treacher reported, Jong-Fast in her CPAC twitter commentary mocked millennial conservative activist Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, who put her in a “rage” for speaking obvious truths like Trump had “revealed” the left’s true nature. She also targeted Glen Beck, “who thinks socialism is very bad.” But she really got miffed at the “scary” pro-life panel and a host who is “very very very very anti-choice,” and she bragged, “People are mad at me for wanting to control my own uterus.” Treacher economically sums up the problem with The Bulwark: “They’re conserving conservatism by behaving just like the people they think have ruined conservatism.”

The Bulwark also is going after writers like Victor Davis Hanson, Hugh Hewitt, Mark Thiessen, and Henry Olsen who support Trump with what editor Charles Sykes calls “sophism and trollery.” Just recently contributor Gabriele Schoenfeld reviewed for The Bulwark Victor Davis Hanson’s new book The Case for Trump. The piece is titled “Sophistry in the Service of Evil,” and like the title, it is a tissue of the question-begging assaults on Trump favored by progressives, such as “blatant racial prejudice” and “racism”; and hysterical adjectives like “demented” and “morally unfit for office.” Indeed, Hanson’s dismemberment of the progressives’ Orwellian “racist” meme is, according to Schoenfeld an example of the “gaping hole that is [Hanson’s] treatment of Trump’s odious life-long record in matters of race,” which is “worse than sophistry”–– it is “sophistry in the service of a genuine evil.”

Schoenfeld finishes with a bit of true sophistry by using an ancient rhetorical device called apophasis: bringing up something unsavory then disavowing it:

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Denmark in a State of Unreported Collapse by Ole Hasselbalch

By on March 14th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13876/denmark-collapse

The official statistical definition of “descendants” includes only the first generation after the person who migrated to Denmark. So the official figures do not show the real picture.

If the population statistics continue to follow that pattern, ethnic Danes — whose birthrate is far lower than that of non-Western immigrants — will become a minority sometime around the year 2065. According to a 2017 report by Statistics Denmark, only about half of non-Western immigrants between the ages of 16 and 64 are employed (53% of men and 45% of women).

In 2017, a third of the entire Danish population provided for by the basic social-welfare system were immigrants, which constitutes a rise of 82% in a mere seven years. These figures show that the public expenses connected to immigration will, in the long run, bring the welfare state to an end.

The media portrayal of Denmark as a country hostile and inhumane to migrants is misleading, if not completely false.

One reason for the inaccurate picture is that it is painted by journalist’ political bias. Another is that trustworthy official Danish statistics on the country’s immigration problem are both difficult to find and even harder to interpret. A further problem is a lack of reliable research, at best; and purposely distorted data, at worst.

The following breakdown illustrates that rather than being more relatively free of the consequences of mass migration than other European countries in general, and Scandinavian countries in particular, Denmark is in a state of societal collapse. In spite of Copenhagen’s many laws that govern migration and affect immigrants, the Danish people have been experiencing a major cultural and political shift in their life as they have traditionally known it.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel vs. its Enemies in Europe by Ruthie Blum

By on March 14th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13847/israel-cancer-breakthroughs

Ireland’s Senate recently voted to support organizations, many headed by terrorists, in imposing a boycott on Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. This, while hardly ever uttering a critical word about countries such as China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Turkey, Mauritania, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, Nigeria, Sudan or South Sudan.

The singling-out of Israel probably tells more about Ireland’s longstanding history of anti-Semitism than about the country it has been targeting.

It is time for the world to cease and desist in its efforts to demonize Israel, and to admit to its use of and reliance on the innovation and technology for healing that Israel — turning no one away — always graciously provides. It would be a welcome change if its adversaries were half as ethical.
Ireland’s Senate recently voted to support organizations, many headed by terrorists , in imposing a boycott on Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. This, while hardly ever uttering a critical word about countries such as China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Turkey, Mauritania, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, Nigeria, Sudan or South Sudan. The singling-out of Israel probably tells more about Ireland’s longstanding history of anti-Semitism than about the country it has been targeting, particularly since it ignores that state’s major contributions to world, including in the field of medicine. Take, for example, cancer research.

The national executive director of the Israel Cancer Research Fund, Mark A. Israel, recently explained why a tiny country such as Israel — in which the “rate of cancer deaths for Jews… is among the lowest in the world” — has made so many important strides in the fight against the deadly global disease for which there is not yet a cure.

“Israel’s scientists are bringing to the cancer fight the same breathtaking innovation, urgency, breakthrough thinking, tireless determination, and adroit use of resources that have been the hallmark of Israeli science and technology for the last 70 years,” wrote Israel, professor emeritus from the Dartmouth Medical School.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The College Admissions Racket Universities are more than innocent victims in this scandal.

By on March 13th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-college-admissions-racket-11552519849
Coming soon to a theater near you: The movie about wealthy and famous parents who paid a California fixer to cheat their child’s way into universities. Many readers have heard about the charges against 50 or so people on Tuesday for this real-life fraud that is a political and cultural indictment of the racket known as college admissions. The details feature William “Rick” Singer, who ran a college-admissions outfit in Newport Beach. Among the portfolio of illegal services he’s admitted to providing: Helping students cheat on standardized tests, sometimes by paying a proctor to correct answers later.

Actress Lori Loughlin allegedly paid a $500,000 bribe to pretend her daughters were recruits for the University of Southern California crew team. The fake-athlete line seems to have been popular and has ensnared coaches at Yale, Stanford and elsewhere. Prosecutors say more indictments are possible.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

U.K. Lawmakers Vote Against Leaving EU Without a Deal Unexpected vote overturns Prime Minister Theresa May’s calculus on getting her deal approved

By on March 13th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-lawmakers-rule-out-any-no-deal-brexit-11552504751

By Stephen Fidler and
Jason Douglas

LONDON—British lawmakers on Wednesday unexpectedly ruled out a no-deal exit from the European Union, throwing Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit strategy into further confusion.

The surprise decision, coming a day after Parliament resoundingly rejected for a second time the deal the prime minister negotiated with the EU laying out conditions for the country’s orderly separation from its biggest trading partner, underlined that Mrs. May has largely lost her grip on the Brexit process.

“In the last 24 hours Parliament has now rejected both her deal and no deal,” said Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the main opposition Labour Party. “Parliament must now take control of the situation.”

Despite Wednesday’s vote, under U.K. and EU law the U.K. is still slated to leave the EU on March 29, unless both sides agree to an extension. Mrs. May urged Parliament to figure out what it wants.

“The onus is now on every one of us in this House to find out what that is,” she said.

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