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Ruth King

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Daryl McCann : The New Totalitarians

By on May 3rd, 2017

Patriotism in the White House, in any other era, would not have been anything out of the ordinary. In the America of managerialism and ‘global governance’, not to mention identity politics, Trump’s patriotism plunges the chattering classes into fits of frothing indignation.
The rise and rise of Donald J. Trump is a revolution. While today’s leftists would call it a counter-revolution, we might all agree that the 2015-16 populist-nationalist insurrection, which swept President Trump to power, falls outside the category of business as usual. For the anti-Trump camp, from Hollywood celebrities to Obama holdouts in the Deep State, Trump’s inauguration represents the moral equivalent of January 30, 1933.

The short-lived Journal of American Greatness and now the quarterly journal American Affairs provide a counterpoint to this Antifa (anti-fascist) narrative. An integral aspect of this nascent Trumpist intelligentsia is a high regard for James Burnham (above), a founding editor of the National Review and the author of such formative works as The Managerial Revolution (1941), The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943), The Struggle for the World (1947) and Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964).

When Burnham died in 1987, President Reagan described him as “one of those principally responsible for the great intellectual odyssey of our century—the journey away from totalitarian statism and towards the uplifting doctrines of freedom”. Not everyone shared Ronald Reagan’s admiration. Old-style Leftists reviled Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians because these books repudiated their fantasy that socialism—that is to say, a classless people’s community—would emerge out of the ruins of capitalism. Trotskyists broke with Burnham (and vice versa) for his refusal to accept that Stalin’s Russia somehow remained a workers’ state, albeit a deformed or degenerated one. Communist apologists, in turn, were aghast at Burnham’s mid-war denunciation of the Soviet Union as “the most extreme totalitarian dictatorship in history”. Coming in the midst of the Swinging Sixties, the central thesis of Suicide of the West—that the real role of American-style liberalism is “to permit Western civilisation to be reconciled to its dissolution”—garnered few friends on the progressive side of politics.

It is a different story with conservatives, of course, but still complicated. During James Burnham’s lifetime his work was widely read and, in the case of the Cold War, highly consequential. Many of the ideas he articulated in The Struggle for the World were already in circulation as early as 1944. He had identified guerrilla skirmishes in Greece, a power vacuum opening up in Eastern Europe, and the Chiang Kai-Shek-Mao Zedong standoff as the early stages of a global conflagration entirely distinct from the Second World War. Winston Churchill would have been aware of Burnham’s thinking before he delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech on March 5, 1946.

Despite this, and his key role in the National Review for a lengthy period, Burnham was rarely a source of political debate in the decades after his death. In 2002, for instance, Roger Kimball wrote an appreciative essay but feared that not even a new biography by Daniel Kelly would rescue James Burnham from relative obscurity:

But in this world, the combination of Burnham’s ferocious intellectual independence and unclubbable heterodoxy long ago consigned him to the unglamorous limbo that established opinion reserves for those who challenge its pieties too forcefully.

A “general renaissance” did not appear to be on the cards—until the momentous events of 2016, that is. In October last year, the anti-Trump conservative Matthew Continetti, editor of the Washington Free Beacon, spoke of the need:

“to rehabilitate Burnham’s vision of a conservative-tinged Establishment capable of permeating the managerial society and gradually directing it in a prudential, reflective, virtuous manner respectful of both freedom and tradition.”

Jeet Heer, a senior editor for the New Republic, lambasted Continetti for “holding up Burnham as an alternative to Trumpism, portraying him as an advocate of a measured, brainy, and pragmatic right-wing politics that seeks to shape elite institutions rather than to take populist delight in burning it all down”. Heer, who writes a bi-weekly column with headings such as “Steve Bannon is Turning Trump into an Ethno-Nationalist Ideologue” and “Donald Trump is the Bizarro Noam Chomsky”, appears to have contracted a particularly virulent strain of Trumpophobia. That said, Heer might be right to argue that Burnham is not “an alternative to Trumpism” and, if anything, “a precursor to Trump”.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Norman – A Review By Marilyn Penn

By on May 3rd, 2017

Count the derogatory characteristics stereotypically applied to Jews and confirmed by this scathing film: pushy, two-faced, greedy, power-hungry, untrustworthy, social-climbing, controlling, puppet-masters of the government – there are more but let’s start with these. Under the guise of being a soft-spoken, gentle schlemiel – the kind of man who knows how to manipulate an invite to a billionaire’s dinner party but shows up wearing a newsboy’s cap that signals why he doesn’t belong – Richard Gere plays Norman, a man who lives by connecting people to other people who can do them important favors. By tailing an Israeli minister as he meanders back to his NY hotel after an important meeting, Norman eventually introduces himself in an elegant men’s shop and promises to get the minister an invitation to the billionaire’s dinner that night. To establish his credibility, he insists on paying for the minister’s exorbitantly expensive shoes – previously tried on and rejected for their extravagance. The greedy minister accepts the offer, and if adjusted for inflation, probably sells out for less than Judas did. Jews have always loved both shekels and beautiful menswear – think of Joseph and that rainbow coat.

There’s a lot more plot concerning a potty-mouthed rabbi who needs to raise money to save his temple (Steve Buscemi); a successful lawyer/nephew who needs a rabbi who will marry him to his Korean love (Michael Sheen); an Israeli prime-minister who needs to get his son accepted to Harvard (Lior Ashkenazi) – a chad gadya of the interlocking needs and wants of Israeli and American Jewry. And there are the un-subtle references to names and types to arouse a nod and smile from viewers who pick up on them – a Korean rabbi at Central Synagogue, the names Alfred Taub and Henry Kavisch. There’s the brief scene showing Norman eating pickled herring from a jar while miles away, the prime-minister is slurping oysters and the soundtrack of glorious cantorial chanting of prayers offers the spirituality that Judaism used to represent. As a movie for home-consumption in Israel, one could make the argument that Norman is an over-extended SNL sketch that skewers its leaders, movers and shakers. As a film sent out for international distribution to an increasingly anti-semitic world, its a misguided attempt at satire that will only re-enforce and inflame existing prejudice.

The writer/director of this film is Joseph Cedar who proves one point about Jewish fixers – he succeeded in rounding up an international cast of movie stars from Hollywood, Israel, England and France. As a footnote to this review, I must add my own amazement that the man who created one of the cleverest and most insightful Israeli films of recent years (FOOTNOTE) is the same man who takes attribution for this pile of lethal ammunition. The auditorium was half-full when I saw this – I can only hope that word of mouth gets this film off the circuit as quickly as you can say “it’s bad for the Jews.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA Comments turned off

Bret Stephens Is Surprised When The Mob He Fed Turned On Him Julie Kelly

By on May 3rd, 2017

On the eve of the Climate March, the New York Times ran Stephens’s first column for them, and it sent the climate mob on a virtual stampede with torches ablaze.

The day before activists took to the streets to blame humankind for causing climate change, a federal court granted President Trump’s request to essentially freeze the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s signature climate policy. Trump signed an executive order in March that instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to review the plan (already tied up in the courts), which sought to reduce carbon emissions by 32 percent of 2005 levels by 2050. It’s expected that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt will gut if not entirely rescind it.

That same day, the EPA announced its website is “undergoing changes that reflect the agency’s new direction under President Donald Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt” and specifically mentions “content related to climate.” This is kinda like when your boss tells you the company is going in a new direction right before she fires you. Happy marching!

But the real knife in the back came in the form of a column posted by Bret Stephens, a new columnist for The New York Times. On the eve of the Climate March, the Times ran Stephens’s first column since it poached him from the Wall Street Journal, and it sent the climate mob on a virtual stampede to the Times’ headquarters with torches ablaze. The Times hired Stephens, a neoconservative, for his virulent anti-Trump stance. As Byron York noted after the announcement, “seeking diversity, NYT editorial page wants anti-Trump opinion from left, right, and center.”

But the move backfired. Stephens has been labeled a climate denier for his past comments on the issue, such as calling global warming a “mass neurosis” and a “sick-souled religion.” Since the Times announced their hire, people have been demanding Stephens’s ouster; a petition on Change.org to fire him earned more than 28,000 signatures and many more threatened to cancel their subscriptions.
Rain on the Climate Parade Produces Hissing Steam

His April 28 column is a partial retort, if not a slight olive branch, to the climate congregation outraged that a heretic is now singing from their climate hymnal. (The Times just opened an entire bureau dedicated to climate change, brooding that “as the earth’s temperature continues to break records, climate and environmental reporting is taking on new urgency.”)

Stephens makes the wholly logical point that “claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong.” He writes how the extremism and arrogance of climate leaders have fueled doubt if not total indifference about manmade climate change among the general public: “Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” he wrote. Irony alert here; keep reading.

If Stephens was trying to advise — if not appease — the climate mob, it didn’t work. The climate Twitterverse imploded Friday afternoon. California billionaire Tom Steyer, whose deep pockets fund climate activism around the world, tweeted that Stephens’s column “is straight out of Exxon playbook” and that it was “no different than a columnist arguing that tobacco use might not cause cancer. Dangerous.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Sorry, College Kids, There’s No Such Thing As Hate Speech By John Daniel Davidson

By on May 3rd, 2017

For the sake of campus protestors and their professors across the country, it’s time to make something clear: there’s no such thing as hate speech.

That should go without saying, since freedom of speech and free inquiry is supposed to be what college is all about. But the recent spate of violent student protests, from the University of California at Berkeley to Middlebury College in Vermont, have been met with a collective shrug from an alarming number of college students, professors, and administrators who seem to be under the impression that violence is okay so long as its purpose is to silence “hate speech.”
By hate speech, they mean ideas and opinions that run afoul of progressive pieties. Do you believe abortion is the taking of human life? That’s hate speech. Think transgenderism is a form of mental illness? Hate speech. Concerned about illegal immigration? Believe in the right to bear arms? Support President Donald Trump? All hate speech.

But in fact, there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. The answer to the question, “Where does free speech stop and hate speech begin?” is this: nowhere. For the purposes of the First Amendment, there is no difference between free speech and hate speech. Ideas and opinions that progressive students and professors find offensive or “hateful” are just as protected by the Bill of Rights as anti-Trump slogans chanted at a campus protest.
‘Fighting Words’ Are Not Hate Speech

There are, of course, certain kinds of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment. But those have nothing to do with hate speech, which has no legal definition. For example, there’s an exception for “fighting words,” which the courts have defined as a face-to-face insult directed at a specific person for the purpose of provoking a fight.

But fighting words can’t be expanded to mean hate speech—or even bigoted speech. In the early 1990s, the city of St. Paul tried to do just that, by punishing what it considered bigoted fighting words under its Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance. The case, which involved a white teenager burning a cross made from taped-together broken chair legs in the front yard of a black family that lived across the street, went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court ruled the city’s ordinance was facially unconstitutional (which means a statute is always unconstitutional and hence void) and that it constituted viewpoint-based discrimination. Writing for the majority in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992), Justice Antonin Scalia explained that, as written,

the ordinance applies only to ‘fighting words’ that insult, or provoke violence, ‘on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender.’ Displays containing abusive invective, no matter how vicious or severe, are permissible unless they are addressed to one of the specified disfavored topics. Those who wish to use ‘fighting words’ in connection with other ideas—to express hostility, for example, on the basis of political affiliation, union membership, or homosexuality—are not covered. The First Amendment does not permit St. Paul to impose special prohibitions on those speakers who express views on disfavored subjects.

As for discriminating against certain viewpoints, Scalia noted that fighting words are excluded from First Amendment protection not because they communicate a particular idea but because “their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey.” The city’s ordinance, he wrote, simply didn’t fit the definition of fighting words:

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israeli-Palestinian Peace Perspectives By Lawrence J. Haas

By on May 3rd, 2017

The “moderate” Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank, continues to provide generous lifetime stipends, lump-sum payments, health care, tuition and other benefits to Israeli-killing terrorists and their families.

At the same time, that same entity is threatening to sue Britain’s government for rejecting its request that London apologize for issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917, paving the way for Israel’s creation.

Meanwhile, facing pressure from the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East recently backed off its plans to revise the curricula of its schools in the West Bank and Gaza – which means that Palestinian children will continue to see maps that erase the Jewish state, thus defining an aspirational Palestine to include all land “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea.”

Those developments, along with the ongoing vows by Palestinian leaders to destroy Israel and the hero worship that they provide to Jew-killing “martyrs,” make clear that Palestinian society maintains its broad-scale “rejectionism” of Israel: denying its right to exist as a Jewish state and dreaming of replacing it with a Palestine that would encompass all of what’s now Israel and the Palestinian territories.

That’s the backdrop to a controversial new idea for resolving the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Israel’s government surely won’t pursue but that, nevertheless, could contribute usefully to the stale debate over how to achieve peace. The idea: Rather than push for more negotiations as part of the “peace process,” push instead for Israeli victory over Palestinian terror as a predicate for negotiations.

This new approach is the joint product of the Middle East Forum as well as a handful of Republican House members who, late last week, officially launched the House’s new Israel Victory Caucus.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

SIX KNOCKS AND A SEVENTH: MOSHE DANN

By on May 3rd, 2017

Today, when Jews in Israel are threatened by many enemies throughout the world, even assisted by some Jews, the Rav urges us to ignore their message of despair, self-doubt and defeatism. On Independence Day, 1956, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “the Rav,” wrote Kol Dodi Dofek (“Listen – My Beloved Knocks”) in which he sought to place the Jews’ return to their homeland into perspective; it could not have been, he concluded, the result of coincidence or luck.

The Rav referred to a tragic parable in the Song of Songs in which a lover knocks on his beloved’s door one night, but she tells him she is tired and he should come back the next day. When he does not return, she searches for him but realizes that he is gone forever and that she has missed her chance for love. Today, when Jews in Israel are threatened by many enemies throughout the world, even assisted by some Jews, the Rav urges us to ignore their message of despair, self-doubt and defeatism.
When published, the Rav’s essay ran to 60 pages. I have highlighted its main points, added a few contemporary details, and included an additional “knock” to make the sound clearer.

1. The first knock of the Beloved (God) was when, despite the antagonism between the West and the Soviet Union, both recognized the legitimacy of a Jewish state. The United Nations came into being solely in order to facilitate that right, on November 29, 1947, and confirmed it by recognizing the State of Israel in May, 1948. A year later, Israel was accepted as a member of the United Nations.

2. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, the second knock was on the battlefield, when the small IDF defeated the mighty armies of five Arab countries.

Using the analogy of the Exodus from Egypt – when Pharaoh hardened his heart and ended up with a worse deal than was originally offered to him – the Rav considers the Arab attack a blessing in disguise. Had the Arabs accepted the UN partition plan and not attacked, Israel would have had to settle for a state which excluded Jerusalem, half of the Galilee and part of the Negev including Beersheba. It could not have survived.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

UCLA: Coddling Hamas on Campus While Trampling the First Amendment Supporting terrorist propaganda on the taxpayer’s dime. Sara Dogan

By on May 2nd, 2017

Editor’s note: UCLA is the latest school to be named to the Freedom Center’s report on the “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” It joins the campuses of Brooklyn College (CUNY), Tufts University, Brandeis University, and Vassar College on the list. These campuses provide financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech critical of Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States.

Last night, the Freedom Center placed posters exposing the links between SJP and Hamas terrorists on the UCLA campus. UCLA administrators such as Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Jerry Kang have previously labeled similar Freedom Center posters “ethnic slander” and an effort to “trigger racially-tinged fear.” These posters pose a challenge to the UCLA administration to abandon these attacks on speech that exposes the truth about SJP and its ties to terrorism, and to fulfill its constitutional obligation to uphold the First Amendment on campus.

University of California-Los Angeles: Jerry Kang, Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and Gene Block, Chancellor:

UCLA Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Jerry Kang has undergone extreme intellectual and political contortions in defending the UCLA chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as “an officially recognized student organization, based on political commitments, that is also in good standing” despite SJP’s constant manifestation of Jew hatred on the Los Angeles campus.

In one widely noted expression of the group’s anti Semitism, SJP members illegally questioned student government candidate Rachel Beyda about whether her status as a Jew would bias her decisions on campus matters. It also attempted to create a litmus test for student government candidates by introducing an initiative that would require them to sign a pledge to not take trips to Israel sponsored by pro-Israel organizations.

Such incidents violate UCLA’s Principles of Community which state, in part, “We are committed to ensuring freedom of expression and dialogue, in a respectful and civil manner, on the spectrum of views held by our varied and diverse campus communities.”

Despite his title as the UCLA administrator in charge of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Vice Chancellor Kang has ignored SJP’s continual violation of these Principles of Community, disregarding the harassment of Jewish students forced to endure SJP’s mock “apartheid walls” plastered with Hamas propaganda and its rallies decrying the founding of the Jewish state as “Al-nakba” or “the catastrophe.” But when the David Horowitz Freedom Center hung posters on campus exposing SJP’s ties to anti-Israel terror group Hamas, and naming campus activists who had worked to bring about the destruction of the Jewish state, both Kang and UCLA Chancellor Gene Block were quick to condemn them. In an email to the entire 50,000 member UCLA community, Kang said the posters were “designed to shock and terrify,” and accused the Freedom Center of using “the tactic of guilt by association, of using blacklists, of ethnic slander, and sensationalized images engineered to trigger racially-tinged fear.” In a second diatribe, he claimed the posters caused “chilling psychological harm” and “focused, personalized intimidation.”

University Chancellor Gene Block also reacted to the posters by stating “Islamophobic posters appeared on campus, in complete disregard of our Principles of Community and the dignity of our Muslim students. But we can, and we will, do our best to hold ourselves to the standards of integrity, inclusion, fairness and compassion that are the hallmarks of a healthy community.”

Quick to defend SJP and its violent rhetoric, Kang and Block have been missing in action when Jewish students faced intimidation and harassment from anti-Semitic speakers and Hamas propaganda plastered across campus.

In addition to the incidents listed above, UCLA SJP holds an annual “Palestine Awareness Week” on campus featuring speakers who endorse the genocidal BDS movement against Israel. SJP’s 2016 event featured journalist Max Blumenthal, who stated during his address that suicide bombing against Jews is justified by “the occupation” and described Palestinian terrorists as “young men who took up arms to fight their occupier.” He also compared Israel to the Islamic state, calling it “‘JSIL,’ the Jewish State in Israel and the Levant.” Another speaker, Miko Peled, also defended Palestinian terrorism, renaming it “a struggle for freedom and justice and equality,” and describing terrorists as “very brave Palestinians who are engaged in fighting this brutal occupation.” Peled also described Jews as analogous to Hitler, calling Jewish soldiers “young little Jewish gestapos,” and further accused Israel of “massive, violent, brutal oppression,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and of being “a colonialist, apartheid, racist system.”

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

North Korean Crisis Continues to Sizzle While tensions rise, the Iran connection is overlooked. Joseph Klein

By on May 2nd, 2017

North Korea continues to hold the foreign policy crisis spotlight. The rogue regime tested yet another missile on Saturday, which failed like the previous attempted launch. Unbowed, North Korea threatened to carry out a nuclear test “at any time and at any location” its leaders choose to do so. “The DPRK’s measures for bolstering the nuclear force to the maximum will be taken in a consecutive and successive way at any moment and any place decided by its supreme leadership,” a spokesman for the North Korean foreign ministry declared, using the acronym for the regime’s formal name, the Democratic Republic of Korea. When President Trump was asked during his “Face the Nation” interview, which aired on Sunday, how he would react to a sixth nuclear test by North Korea, he replied, “I would not be happy.” In response to a follow-up question whether being unhappy meant “military action,” President Trump, as usual, kept his options open. “I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see,” he said.

The weekend drama followed an open ministerial level meeting of the United Nations Security Council last Friday on the North Korean situation, presided over by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Secretary Tillerson made clear that all options remained on the table, including military action if necessary. However, the bulk of his address was devoted to urging all members of the international community to tighten the economic and diplomatic screws on North Korea in order to increase its isolation.

“For too long, the international community has been reactive in addressing North Korea,” Secretary Tillerson said. “Those days must come to an end. Failing to act now on the most pressing security issue in the world may bring catastrophic consequences.” Talks are out of the question, he added, until North Korea decides to “take concrete steps to reduce the threat that its illegal weapons programs pose to the United States and our allies.” This means not just a nuclear and missile freeze, which is something China has proposed in exchange for a freeze on major military exercises in the region by the United States and South Korea. The Trump administration will be looking for evidence that North Korea is actually beginning “to dismantle its nuclear weapons and missile technology programs.” That is highly unlikely, however, as the regime sees its survival depending on its ability to project a credible nuclear threat against its enemies, particularly the United States.

The Trump administration has tried to distinguish its policy of “urgency” with the failed “strategic patience” approach of the Obama administration. What that means in practical terms is three-fold.

First, tighten enforcement of existing UN sanctions and ramp up the sanctions both at the UN and unilaterally. “We must levy new sanctions on DPRK entities and individuals supporting its weapons and missile programs, and tighten those already in place,” Secretary Tillerson told the Security Council. “The United States also would much prefer countries and people in question own up to their lapses and correct their behavior themselves, but we will not hesitate to sanction third country entities and individuals supporting the DPRK’s illegal activities.”

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IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Comparing Mideast Refugees with WWII Holocaust Victims What are the similarities? Rabbi Aryeh Spero

By on May 2nd, 2017

President Trump has been under relentless attack from those on the Left against his efforts to limit immigration from terrorist-producing areas and his call for comprehensive vetting and background checks. Beyond doubt, it is the first and most important duty of a President to protect the lives of a country’s citizens, especially where a possibility exists of terrorists being embedded within a particular immigration flow. As the President previously stated, to not strictly enforce our immigration laws is “not compassion but recklessness”.

Some groups are exploiting the Holocaust to promote unrestricted Syrian and other Mideast immigration into this country. However, it is incorrect to draw a parallel between the Jews who fled Europe in the 1930s, who were, as Jews, specific targets for genocide and Nazi concentration camps, and those today wishing to escape the civil war in their Mideast countries. The Syrians, for example, are not being targeted because they are Muslims, and there is no Final Solution planned against them. Their civil wars have placed them in very difficult circumstances, but it is not comparable to the deliberate and planned Final Extermination which was specifically directed at Jews as Jews during the unparalleled Holocaust. It’s a different category altogether.

Furthermore, comparisons to the Holocaust situation are improper, for (2) there were no Nazi agents embedded within the fleeing Jews; (3) the Jews did not harbor a cultural or religious ideology wishing to sow physical destruction on the American people; and (4) there were no rabbis in the 1930s sending forth commands worldwide to destroy the “infidels”. Indeed, (5) the completely innocent Jews of Europe had nowhere to go, no country to take them in — there was not yet a State of Israel—whereas there are 57 Islamic states, many exceedingly wealthy, who could be providing safe haven to their Islamic brothers.

If there is a genocide parallel it involves the Christians of the Middle East who have for decades been targets of the Muslim genocide against them simply for being Christian. And yet, the Left has been silent regarding the plight of Christians. During the Obama years, Christian immigration here from Islamic territories was, based on population percentages, 90% less than what it should have been. Mr. Obama moralized about “not using a religious litmus test” to over-weight Muslim immigration, while severely undercutting and ignoring thousands of Christian refugees begging to be rescued from the Islamic jihad against them.

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Illegal Alien Day The Left used May Day to push its open-borders agenda this year. Matthew Vadum

By on May 2nd, 2017

There were loud, violent, disruptive protests across America yesterday for International Workers’ Day, but American workers’ issues were barely discussed as they took a back seat to the Left’s current mania for illegal aliens and open borders.

This May Day comes after R. Alexander Acosta, 48, was sworn in as the 27th Secretary of Labor by Vice President Mike Pence last week. Acosta, whose nomination was endorsed by the Laborers’ International Union of North America and other unions, was a U.S. Attorney and dean of Florida International University College of Law. He was easily confirmed by the Senate on April 27 by a vote of 60 to 38.

In America, May Day is typically a violent observance. Its purpose is to serve as a rallying point for communists and socialists. Despite that, it hasn’t been that difficult to take the focus off the plight of American workers on May 1 over the years. Perhaps this is because America has never been a left-of-center country perpetually boiling over with class resentment. Americans don’t care much about labor issues or the labor movement because it hasn’t done anything for them.

Like every president since Dwight Eisenhower, President Trump declared May 1 Loyalty Day. In his proclamation, Trump said Loyalty Day is meant “to express our country’s loyalty to individual liberties, to limited government, and to the inherent dignity of every human being.” Last year President Obama used his Loyalty Day proclamation to blather on about “our diversity” and about the importance of delivering a “fairer Nation to the next generation.”

In the late 19th century, the Left hijacked May Day, a perfectly good ancient celebration of spring and fertility in the British Isles and elsewhere. It used to be a day of dancing around the maypole, singing, and eating cake.

May Day was celebrated in early America but today it is largely forgotten in this country. And so it was easy for the Left to fill this cultural vacuum and co-opt May Day for its own anti-American purposes.

And with Democrats and the rest of the Left in disarray after Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat in November, radical immigration activists were seemingly able to wrest May Day away from organized labor this year.

This year’s May Day observances ranged from indifferent to conspicuously hostile to American workers as organizers used May 1 to largely ignore the plight of native workers pushed out of their jobs by cheaper illegal alien labor. The so-called rights of illegal alien workers took center stage yesterday.

On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Carlson mocked leftist campaigners for sounding like agents of the pro-open borders, pro-immigration amnesty U.S. Chamber of Commerce and for refusing to condemn illegal alien workers for driving wages down and leaving legally present workers unemployed or underemployed.

Steven Choi, executive director of the George Soros-funded New York Immigration Coalition, wasted a valuable prime time spot on Carlson’s Fox News Channel show ducking questions about how immigrants put downward pressure on wages.

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