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Ruth King

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Make Jerusalem Safe Again Why Muslims living in Israel don’t migrate to the Palestinian Authority. Ilana Mercer

By on January 27th, 2017

Relocating the American Embassy to Jerusalem, as President Donald Trump has pledged to do, is more than symbolic. It’s what Christians should be praying for if they value celebrating future Easter Holy Weeks, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, located in Jerusalem’s Old City. With such a forceful gesture, the Trump Administration will be affirming, for once and for all, the undivided Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State.

There’s a reason Muslims living in Israel proper—1.5 million of them—don’t migrate to the adjacent Palestinian Authority. They’re better off in Israel. Should Jerusalem, East and West, be recognized formally as the capital of Israel only, under Jewish control alone; Christianity’s holiest sites will be better off. Judaism’s holy sites will be safer. And so will Islam’s.

Jerusalem is no settlement to be haggled over; it’s the capital of the Jewish State. King David conquered it 1000 years Before Christ. The city’s “Muslim Period” began only in the year 638 of the Common Era. “Yerushalaim,” and not Al Quds, is the name of the city that was sacred to Jews for nearly two thousand years before Muhammad. Not once is Jerusalem mentioned in the Quran. And while Muhammad was said to have departed to the heavens from the Al Aksa Mosque, there was no mosque in Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock and the Al Aksa Mosque were built upon the Jewish Temple Mount. Muslim theologians subsequently justified this usurpation by superimposing their own chronology—and relatively recent fondness for Jerusalem—upon the existing, ancient sanctity of the place to Jews.

Essentially, this amounts to historical identity theft.

It’s bad enough that Bethlehem—the burial site of the matriarch Rachel, birthplace to King David and Jesus and site of the Church of the Nativity—is controlled by the Palestinians. But, as one wag wondered, “How would Christians react if the Muslim theologians aforementioned had chosen to appropriate the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, rename it and declare it Muslim property?”

There is nothing Solomonic about splitting up Jerusalem, which—it bears repeating—was sacred to Jews for nearly two millennia before Muhammad and is not in the Quran. “The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem,” notes Dr. Daniel Pipes, is political, not religious or historic. As such, it’s also a recent project. “Centuries of neglect came to an abrupt end after June 1967, when the Old City came under Israeli control,” explains Pipes. “Palestinians [then] again made Jerusalem the centerpiece of their political program, [when, in fact] Mecca is the eternal city of Islam, the place from which non-Muslims are strictly forbidden. Very roughly speaking, [Mecca is to Islam] what Jerusalem is to Judaism.”

East Jerusalem was not annexed in June of 1967. Rather, Jerusalem was unified.

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Can Trump Bell the Progressive Cat? The battle to shrink the last half-century of hypertrophied statism and leftist tyranny. Bruce Thornton

By on January 27th, 2017

As I listened to Trump’s Inaugural Address, I thought of Aesop’s fable about the mice who were being devastated by a ferocious cat. As they debated what to do, a brash young mouse proposed putting a bell around the cat’s neck. That way the mice would hear its approach and scurry to safety. All applauded until one greybeard mouse posed the question: “Who’s going to put the bell around the cat’s neck?”

Especially in politics, it’s easy to propose simple, if not impossible, solutions to complex problems.

Trump’s speech was a rousing catalogue of promises to “make America great again.” Infrastructure development, rebuilding the inner cities, bringing back jobs to America, securing the borders, returning the power usurped by the feds back to the people, making “America first,” and eradicating Islamic jihad “from the face of the earth” comprise an ambitious agenda, to say the least. Perhaps these are mere negotiating positions to be adjusted later, but politics isn’t business. What a candidate thinks is typical campaign hyperbole, the voting public often considers promises to be taken seriously.

Ask George H.W. Bush, who broke his promise “Read my lips: no new taxes,” and lost his reelection bid. And that was just one costly broken promise. Trump has named a whole pack of cats he has promised to bell.

Just consider Trump’s promise about “transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.” Sounds good, but he said nothing specific about reducing the size of the feds, or restoring citizen self-rule. Yes, on Monday he imposed a hiring freeze on federal workers. So did Ronald Reagan in 1981, but that didn’t slow down much the fed expansion in the long term. And Trump’s claim that he will reduce regulations by 75% is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but highly unlikely without a lot of help from Congress.

Trump needs to be more specific, and realistic, about how he will restore power to the citizenry by undoing the un-Constitutional concentration of powers in the executive and its metastasizing agencies, enabled over the years by compliant Congresses and activist Supreme Courts. The result is our country’s feral cat, the bloated federal government spawned and nourished by progressives for nearly a century, with significant help from Republicans. As the fed has waxed ever fatter, the intrusive reach of its agencies, councils, and bureaus into all aspects of our lives––corporations, small businesses, churches, schools, private organizations, state and local governments––subjects them to the coercive power of federal agencies to regulate, investigate, and punish anything that challenges their technocratic pretensions to greater intelligence and efficiency than the sovereign citizenry possesses.

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20th Century Women Is a Stale Feminist Diatribe And Streep has won an Oscar nod for ranting against Trump. By Armond White

By on January 27th, 2017

The best thing about Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women is a title that immediately tells us two things: 1) Its sexual politics are dated, and 2) its story will focus on outmoded cultural ideals. This is the same erroneous basis of Millennial social protest, which always imitates past examples.

The worst thing about 20th Century Women is that it indeed looks at women through an archaic social lens — the peculiar Obama-era combination of guilt and arrogance that has been widely accepted without thinking, as last week’s unfocussed pink-hat parades demonstrated.

In 20th Century Women, Dorothea (Annette Bening), a 55-year-old widow from Santa Barbara, Calif., raises her 15-year-old son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), amid the company of several lodgers in her big ramshackle house: two wayward young women (Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning) and a sexy but nonthreatening man (Billy Crudup). The house, a Queen Anne antique that may as well be a social-justice museum, is the site of Dorothea’s social experiment — a homegrown conversion-therapy camp. Each of these idiosyncratic, slightly damaged individuals presents Jamie with life lessons (on menarche, abortion, menopause, masculine aggression) that are like a camp curriculum. This is no mere coming-of-age tale; Mills could also have titled his tearjerker “How to Build a Male Feminist.”

Bening’s Dorothea is a post–Betty Friedan, post–Gloria Steinem, post–Germaine Greer version of the Archie comics’ pedant, Miss Grundy. (Mills regularly digresses into anecdotes from the Seventies feminist bible Sisterhood Is Powerful.) Always wearing flowered blouses, with tousled hair and age-lined face and neck, Dorothea is Everymom, but with fascinating actorly props (primarily Bening’s throaty delivery). It’s a master class in laid-back dominance, a Ms. magazine cartoon contrived of equal parts maternal nostalgia and white career-woman regret. I admire Bening’s subtlety: She limits Dorothea’s arrogance to the delicate control she exerts over her tenants and the emotional sway she holds over her son (she salts their relationship with condescension by referring to him as “kid”). But I don’t admire Mills’s maudlin shift when nostalgia for Mom turns into sanctification of the sacrifices that feminist standard-bearers claim all females shared.

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The Draft Executive Order on Detention and Interrogation: Much Ado About Nothing Trump is clear: Changes in law must be enacted through Congress. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on January 27th, 2017

One should not be surprised at the Media-Democrat complex’s attempt to manufacture a scandal over a draft executive order on the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants that the Trump White House refuses to avow. After all, nothing united the Left and fueled the Democratic political ascendancy of 2005 through 2009 like the anti-torture crusade. It had all the necessary elements of a successful campaign: outsized progressive indignation, the collusion of influential Republicans (especially John McCain, whose personal history imbued him with a moral authority that deflected the incoherence of his contentions), and an enfeebled Republican administration too exhausted and too worried about the press to defend itself effectively.

Factor in some of now-President Trump’s most outrageous statements on the campaign trail — such as suggesting that he would have the families of terrorists killed and would employ interrogation techniques harsher than waterboarding — and it became a ripe dead certainty that the Left would mobilize at the first hint of policy deliberations over the handling of captured terrorists.

For now, however, it is much ado about nothing.

At most, what we’re seeing is another iteration of a problem I alluded to Wednesday in addressing President Obama’s negotiations over the now-defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership: the need for confidential deliberations versus the determination of the press (and of Democrats during any GOP administration) that there shall be no secrets.

The Trump administration has not yet announced a policy on the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. Critics should hold their fire until that happens. The draft executive order is just that, a draft — even if we assume, based on reported indications from unidentified administration leakers, that it is part of the discussion in Trump’s national-security team.

It is not just a commonplace — it is an inevitability that major policy decisions and the memoranda that memorialize them go through numerous iterations before they are finalized. The Left’s tired playbook depicts all Republican presidents as imbeciles and their advisers as amateur hour. Thus, much is being made of the fact that the draft executive order gets the date of the 9/11 attacks wrong, placing them a decade after the fact, on September 11, 2011. Put aside that this mistake is clearly a typo. (I’ve done it myself a number of times; plus, the date of the 9/11 attacks is rendered correctly on page 2 of the document.) The error also occurs in the very first paragraph (near the beginning, on the fifth line). To a sensible, objective analyst, that would suggest that wherever this draft comes from, it must be a document produced very early in the deliberation process. It must not have been perused by too many people before the New York Times “obtained” it.

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The Obama Administration’s Ugly Legacy of Undermining American Electoral Integrity By selectively enforcing the law, Obama’s DOJ hurt efforts to stamp out voter fraud. By Hans A. von Spakovsky

By on January 27th, 2017

This Friday, the U.S. Justice Department, due to the prior actions of the Obama administration, will be conspicuously absent from a federal courtroom in Virginia as a lawsuit kicks off that could prove critical to protecting the integrity of American elections.

The lawsuit before the court revolves around the public’s right, under federal law, to examine election records. In this case, the specific records sought to identify thousands of aliens who were illegally registered to vote in Virginia. Many of these non-citizens actually cast ballots in prior elections.

During the Obama era, the Justice Department regularly went to court to back left-wing groups, such as Project Vote, which sought access to voter-registration records under the same federal law at issue in the Virginia case. But on Friday, the Justice Department will be nowhere in sight.

Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), 52 U.S.C. § 20507(i), gives the public — and the Justice Department — an unhindered right to inspect election records. Under Section 8, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a nonprofit law firm dedicated to election integrity, has been gathering records on aliens who registered and voted illegally in Virginia. Prior to the November election, it uncovered more than 1,000 illegal aliens registered to vote in just eight counties, and those were just the cases it caught by accident; its review was not comprehensive, because some counties refused to comply with the law and provide the records requested. PILF consequently took one of the recalcitrant jurisdictions, the City of Manassas, to federal court.

This time, the Obama Justice Department filed no briefs supporting transparency. It was left up to J. Christian Adams, PILF’s general counsel, to oppose the city’s effort to dismiss the suit and hide its records. (It’s worth noting that there is no indication Manassas forwarded these records to state or federal law enforcement for investigation and prosecution, despite the fact that registration or voting by a noncitizen is a felony under both state and federal law.)

This is the next battlefield for election integrity. Local officials are working to decide how or if to clean up their voter rolls, along with whether the public has a right to check their work. Counties across the country are resisting transparency. This has to stop.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Flyers at U Kansas: ‘Make America Great Again’ is ‘Coded’ ‘Neo-Nazi Language’ By Katherine Timpf ???!!!!

By on January 27th, 2017

Flyers have popped up around the University of Kansas campus warning students that “neo-nazis and hate groups will use coded language to avoid being called what they are” — and that “Make America Great Again” is an example of this language.

The flyers, which were obtained by Campus Reform, allege that “there has been a disturbing presence of neo-nazi and hate group recruitment taking place on campus.”

“Given the violent and dangerous nature of groups such as this, it’s imperative that we do not allow their presence to become normative,” the flyer states.

The flyer also encourages students to photograph, “remove,” and report any materials that they see from one of these “hate” groups around campus.

Now, I’m not ignorant of the fact that some of the people who voted for Trump did do so because they’re racist, but that doesn’t represent all of the people who did — or even most of them. Some did it because they’re pro-life. Some people did it because they felt that workers in the manufacturing sector have been ignored. All kinds of people voted for Donald Trump for all kinds of reasons, and to spread the idea that when you hear someone say “Make America Great Again,” they’re really saying “Pssssst! I’m a Nazi!” is completely insane.

What’s more, the content of these flyers actually works against what the people who posted them are trying to accomplish. First of all, absurd, haphazard “Nazi!” accusations only distract from the very real examples of racism and intolerance that do exist in our society. Second, a lot of people who voted for Trump did so because they were sick of an overly “PC” culture, sick of seeing people hurl accusations of racism and sexism at others over every little thing — and the kind of stuff that’s on these flyers will only encourage them to vote for him again.

According to Campus Reform, it’s not clear who is responsible for posting the flyers.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hungary and the Crisis of Europe Unelected elites are bent on transforming Europe, against the clear will of most of the people. By Viktor Orban —

By on January 27th, 2017

— Viktor Orban is the prime minister of Hungary.

In the annals of European history, 2015 will go down as the inception of a new era. It marked the end of an age when we could take Europe’s secure and sheltered status for granted, assured in the knowledge that it was all up to Europe and no one else. More than a year and a half has passed since I first warned of the danger posed by a potential new wave of mass migration. Today, that mass migration is an accomplished fact, one that no sane person would dispute.

Why were we, Hungarians — or, rather, East Central Europeans — the first to recognize this threat? Several possibly concurrent explanations are conceivable. Perhaps it had to do with the tempestuous times we lived through, the shock waves of historic turmoil, the toil and struggle that followed the democratic turn of history in 1990. Our Western partners experienced the last 50 to 60 years very differently. There, it was all about success, prosperity, a predictable future, well-trodden paths to a better life. To us, all that seems like a fantasy world where ideology mingles with illusion and reality, the boundaries become blurred between nation and nation, culture and culture, man and woman, the sacred and the profane, freedom and responsibility, noble intentions and actual action.

The Danger Is Here, Now
For the West, “what is” has become increasingly difficult to disentangle from “what ought to be.” By contrast, our perception of the real remains as sharp and cold as common sense. We have learned that the real is that which refuses to disappear even if we have stopped believing in it.

That compels us to recognize that the second and third decades of the 21st century will be defined by the mass migration of peoples. Until recently we thought such things could happen only in times gone by and were relegated to history books. We would not face the impending danger of an unprecedented mass of people — greater than the total population of some European countries — setting out for our continent in the coming years. Now that danger is upon us.

Parallel societies have been rearing their heads in several European countries — displacing the world we know as ours, the one we hope to pass to our children and grandchildren. Not all of those who come here intend to accept our ways of life. Some see their own customs and worldview as more valuable, stronger, and more viable. But these are of little use to us as we struggle to replenish the work force that is now abandoning the manufacturing plants of Western Europe — for generations, the unemployment rate among residents not born in Europe has many times higher than that among natives. In most cases, the nations of Europe have failed to integrate even the masses that have gradually poured in from Asia and Africa over the course of several decades. How can we now expect countries to integrate migrants quickly, with large numbers arriving all at once?

Admittedly, Europe is suffering from an aging and dwindling population. But if we try to solve this problem by relying on newly arriving Muslims, we will squander our way of life, our security, our very selves. Unless we make a stand, and do so quickly, the tension between an aging Europe and a young Muslim world — between a Europe unable to provide its own young with work and an undertrained Muslim ghetto — will spiral out of hand in the heart of Europe.

Ordinary Europeans know this well enough. In the past year, the Hungarian government commissioned a public-opinion poll encompassing 28 member states of the European Union. It revealed that more than 60 percent of Europeans have no doubt whatsoever that a direct correlation exists between the escalation of terrorism, higher crime rates, and migration. By the same token, 63 percent believe that migration transforms the culture of the host country. Illegal migration presents a threat, facilitates terrorism, and boosts crime. It repaints Europe’s cultural face, brushing over national cultures on a massive scale.

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3 Men Gang-Rape Young Woman in Sweden, Broadcast It Live on Facebook By Michael van der Galien

By on January 27th, 2017

Welcome to our brave new digital world in which raping women is all fun and games:

Police are reportedly investigating the suspected gang rape of a woman after the attack was live-streamed on Facebook.

An online witness said the victim had her clothes pulled off by armed men and was sexually assaulted before cops arrived and turned off the camera.

According to Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, three people have been arrested after the alleged attack was broadcast in a closed Facebook group last night.

Dutch website De Dagelijkse Standaard (of which I’m editor-in-chief) adds that the three suspects have been identified. It must come as a shock to all those who worship at the altar of political correctness and multiculturalism, but the rapists are, wait for it, all immigrants. In this screenshot of the gang rape, you can see two of the three suspects in action:

screen-shot-2017-01-26-at-17-55-37

The first suspect’s name is Emillem ‘Lemon’ Khodagholi. Khodagholi was on probation for a variety of crimes (theft, assault, drugs crimes, and death threats) when he participated in this horrendous crime. Shortly before he and his friends raped the poor woman at the point of a gun, Khodagholi announced his plans to his followers. “Listen, today I will f*ck. I swear it on my mother,” he said, adding that he would cause “a rampage.”

Not long after, he and the other two suspects entered the young woman’s apartment in the city of Uppsala. They raped her for a full three hours. The entire crime was broadcast live on Facebook. Yesterday, footage was released of Khodagholi bullying his victim when she was calling someone for help. The poor girl was barely conscious, but her rapist couldn’t control himself. “You got raped. There, we have the answers. You’ve been raped,” he shouted gleefully at her. He then laughed like a psychopath and continued to make fun of her.

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Donald Trump Confronting Voter Fraud Denial By Karin McQuillan

By on January 27th, 2017

President Trump is about to destroy the P.C. thought police who say interest in valid elections is racist and that claims of fraud are nuts.

Fox Radio News yesterday joined the liberal media meltdown. Driving home, I heard the afternoon news claiming that Fox knows of no studies supporting Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. They must be relying on Google searches instead of reading conservative websites. Tell me Fox reporters don’t read the Wall St. Journal or National Review, which have been publishing alarming columns by the voter fraud expert John Fund for years. No surprise – Fox reporters know less than the readers of AT.

Fox News itself reported on voter fraud in California this November:

Jerry Mosna was gardening outside his San Pedro, Calif., home Saturday when he noticed something odd: Two stacks of 2016 ballots on his mailbox. The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.

Daily Caller:

[As many as] 2.8 million non-citizens voted in the 2008 elections, according to a study published in Electoral Studies journal in 2014. … participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes[.]

American Thinker:

ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote generated an impressive 1.1 million voter registration packages across America in 2008. The problem was that election officials invalidated 400,000 – that’s 36 percent – of the registrations filed …

As John Fund writes at pages 27-8 of Stealing Elections:

‘incentivizing’ of fraud… the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. … Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification … had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar . Finally, states were limited in pruning ‘dead wood’ – people who had died, moved or been convicted of crimes … it has fueled an explosion of phantom voters. …

Marxists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were instrumental in the passage of the law by Congress. … Bill Clinton gave a shout-out to Cloward and Piven at the bill-signing ceremony in 1993 that both attended.

“Between 1994 and 1998, nearly 26 million names were added to the voter rolls nationwide, almost a 20 percent increase,” according to Fund. Motor Voter has “been registering illegal aliens, since anyone who receives a government benefit [including welfare] may also register to vote with no questions asked.”

If ten percent of these unvetted voters are illegal, that validates Trump’s claim.

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Miami complies with President Trump’s executive order cracking down on ‘sanctuary cities’

By on January 27th, 2017

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/01/26/miami-complies-with-president-trumps-executive-order-cracking-d/21701318/ President Trump is making it much riskier to be an undocumented immigrant in Miami. Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez said the county will comply with Trump’s executive order forcing all so-called “sanctuary cities” to turn over undocumented immigrants who are arrested. Sanctuary cities or counties are areas where local officials decline federal requests to […]

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