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Ruth King

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Trump’s Taiwan call wasn’t a mistake. It was brilliant. Mark Thiessen

By on December 6th, 2016

Relax. Breathe.

Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan wasn’t a blunder by an inexperienced president-elect unschooled in the niceties of cross-straits diplomacy.

It was a deliberate move — and a brilliant one at that.

The phone call with President Tsai Ing-wen was reportedly carefully planned, and Trump was fully briefed before the call, according to The Washington Post. It’s not that Trump was unfamiliar with the “Three Communiques” or unaware of the fiction that there is “One China.” Trump knew precisely what he was doing in taking the call. He was serving notice on Beijing that it is dealing with a different kind of president — an outsider who will not be encumbered by the same Lilliputian diplomatic threads that tied down previous administrations. The message, as John Bolton correctly put it, was that “the president of the United States [will] talk to whomever he wants if he thinks it’s in the interest of the United States, and nobody in Beijing gets to dictate who we talk to.”

Amen to that.

And if that message was lost on Beijing, Trump underscored it on Sunday, tweeting: “Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!” He does not need Beijing’s permission to speak to anyone. No more kowtowing in a Trump administration.

Trump promised during the campaign that he would take a tougher stand with China, and supporting Taiwan has always been part of his get-tough approach to Beijing. As far back as 2011, Trump tweeted: “Why is @BarackObama delaying the sale of F-16 aircraft to Taiwan? Wrong message to send to China. #TimeToGetTough.” Indeed, the very idea that Trump could not speak to Taiwan’s president because it would anger Beijing is precisely the kind of weak-kneed subservience that Trump promised to eliminate as president.

Trump’s call with the Taiwanese president sent a message not only to Beijing, but also to the striped-pants foreign-policy establishment in Washington. It is telling how so many in that establishment immediately assumed Trump had committed an unintended gaffe. “Bottomless pig-ignorance” is how one liberal foreign-policy commentator described Trump’s decision to speak with Tsai.

Trump just shocked the world by winning the presidential election, yet they still underestimate him. The irony is that the hyperventilation in Washington has far outpaced the measured response from Beijing. When American foreign-policy elites are more upset than China, perhaps it’s time for some introspection.

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EDUCATION, MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Twin Pillars of Progressive Prejudice Universities and the media: arrogant, ignorant, and ripe for reform By Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 6th, 2016

In media land, Donald Trump is a reckless tweeter; Barack Obama’s outreach to GloZell and rapper Kendrick Lamar is just kicking back and having fun (Lamar’s latest album portrayed the corpse of a judge to the toasting merriment of rappers on the White House lawn). In media land, Donald Trump risked world peace by accepting a phone call from the democratically elected president of Taiwan; Barack Obama’s talks with dictators and thugs such as Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and Raul Castro were long overdue. In media land, jawboning Carrier not to relocate a plant to Mexico is an existential threat to the free market; not so when Barack Obama tried to coerce Boeing to move to Washington State to produce union-made planes, or bullied a small non-union guitar company, or reordered the bankruptcy payouts of Chrysler and essentially took over the company.

In campus land, the election of 2008 was cause for ebullition; in 2016, elections by nature were traumatic as students were reduced to whining toddlers who needed cookies and milk.

(Note that campus post-election micro-parenting is not extended to departing students when they are hit with huge student-loan totals. Then they suddenly morph from helpless teenagers to full-fledged adults who must pay up what they borrowed to the colleges that did not educate them. Offering cookies and “caring” are a lot cheaper than not collecting overdue loans.) In campus land, federal laws should be rendered null and void — as in 1861 (over slavery) or 1961 (over racial integration of schools) — as colleges see fit; Donald Trump is a near fascist for wanting carry out the oath of his office by enforcing all federal statutes against states’-rights subversion.

The university and the media share two traits: Both industries have become arrogant and ignorant. We have created a climate, ethically and professionally, in which extremism has bred extremism, and bias is seen not as proof of journalistic and academic corruption, but of political purity. The recent election, and especially its aftermath, embarrassed journalists and academics alike — and should not be forgotten.

In the aftermath, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as they insist that the popular vote alone should have mattered, that the Russians stole the election, that there was voting fraud, but only in the swing states Trump won, or that Democrats did not emphasize identity politics enough — anything other than the truth that a now municipal Democratic party is run by apartheid coastal elites and fueled by identity politics, and that journalists and professors cannot keep society’s trust.

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The Brown-Becerra Axis For Illegals Radical new California Attorney General will defy federal law. Lloyd Billingsley

By on December 6th, 2016

On November 8, Kamala Harris gained election to the U.S. Senate and California Governor Jerry Brown has selected Rep. Xavier Becerra to take her place as state attorney general. “I’m confident he will be a champion for all Californians and help our state aggressively combat climate change,” said Brown in a statement. For his part, Becerra made it clear he had other priorities.

As the Sacramento Bee noted, Becerra “appeared to back California’s efforts to prevent removal of unauthorized immigrants who pose no threat to public safety.” And as Brown’s attorney general pick explained, “If you want to take on a forward-leaning state that is prepared to defend its rights and interests, then come at us.” For the task of defending all “unauthorized immigrants,” Becerra is well qualified.

At Stanford, where he earned his bachelor and law degrees, Becerra was a member of MEChA, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano De Aztlan. A belch from the sixties’ left, MEChA calls the southwest portion of the United States “Aztlan” and seeks to regain the territory for Mexico. The MEChA slogan is “Entre la raza todo, fuera de la raza, nada,” and the “raza” is not the human race.

“I was a member of MEChA when I was in college,” Becerra told Sean Hannity in 2003.

“It’s an organization that promotes the ability for young people to get to college, the way I got to be the first in my family to go to college.” Becerra said. The eleven-year congressman would not respond to Hannity’s questions about the group’s racist slogans and irredentist campaign.

Becerra was a possible running mate for Hillary Clinton, and in her 2014 Hard Choices Clinton explains: “after all, much of the southwestern part of the United States once belonged to Mexico, and decades of immigration have only strengthened the familial and cultural ties between our nations.” Clinton liked Becerra but apparently had trouble pronouncing his name. The MEChA veteran remained in Congress, where he faithfully supported amnesty for those in the country illegally.

As Daniel Greenfield noted, Becerra also blocked funds for the war on Islamic terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, claiming that he wanted to avoid “another Vietnam.” He also voted against a commendation for US troops’ service in Iraq. His passion, however, remains the defense of illegals and he is a perfect fit for governor Jerry Brown, uncritical of sanctuary cities that shelter violent criminals.

Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, also known as José Inez García Zarate, was a felon who had been deported five times. He duly found refuge in San Francisco, Jerry Brown’s home town, where he gunned down Kathryn Steinle, 32, in July of 2015. That killing did not prompt the governor to challenge sanctuary cities, and Becerra told reporters “I don’t believe we should be trying to ascribe blame based on a designation as a sanctuary city.”

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Senator Sessions Isn’t a Racist, His Left-Wing Accusers Are. They’re coming for Sessions Daniel Greenfield

By on December 6th, 2016

They’re coming for Senator Sessions. The Alabama Senator, soon to be Attorney General, has been denounced by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which bills its poison pen letter as coming from “civil and human rights organizations.” Just don’t ask which ones.

The “civil rights” organizations include the AFL-CIO, which had just denounced its own “ugly history of racism” last year, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose leaders have at times defended and excused the anti-Semitic and racist Islamic terror of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the National Council of La Raza, whose name means “The Race” and reflects its racialist agenda.

A thuggish union that concedes its own ugliness and two racist groups, one of which defends Islamic terrorists, are the worst possible people to pass any kind of judgment on Senator Sessions.

But it gets worse.

There’s the Center for Responsible Lending, funded by the Sandlers, who helped cause the economic crisis by peddling subprime mortgages. Lending doesn’t get more responsible than that. And there’s also the National Lawyers Guild, which started life as a Communist front group and arguably continues as such, praising North Korea’s “free healthcare and education systems.” Move over Cuba, North Korea has even more shovel-ready free health care for the oppressed comrades of the working class.

I don’t know why the Conference couldn’t manage to get Al Qaeda to sign on to their letter against Sessions. Maybe Osama bin Laden’s iPhone can’t get any bars at the bottom of the Arabian Sea.

But this motley crew of racists, traitors and terrorists has issued its ruling and found that, “Senator Sessions is the wrong person to serve as the U.S. Attorney General.”

The right person is Vladimir Lenin. Unfortunately he’s dead and not qualified to practice law.

You would think that the “144 undersigned organizations” representing billions in wealth and untold amounts of power and influence, could manage a more coherent smear campaign. Instead the letter rehashes the same old discredited smears. Senator Sessions’ joke about the KKK smoking pot is described as “speaking favorably about the Ku Klux Klan” even while admitting that “he was helpful in the Center’s successful effort to sue and bankrupt the Ku Klux.”

Sessions is accused of undermining “voting rights” by prosecuting the “voting rights activists” who were caught mailing hundreds of absentee ballots. These “voter suppression tactics targeting African Americans” came in response to complaints of fraud by African-American officials like Perry County Commissioner Reese Billingslea and John Kennard, Alabama’s first black tax assessor, who said, “The only reason these people are hollering racism now is because they are in trouble for breaking the law.”

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The West’s Politically Correct Dictatorship It Has Blinded Us to the Real Danger: Radical Islam by Giulio Meotti

By on December 6th, 2016

The brave work of the artist Mimsy was removed from London’s Mall Galleries after the British police defined it “inflammatory.”

In France, schools teach children that Westerners are Crusaders, colonizers and “bad.” In their efforts to justify the repudiation of France and its Judeo-Christian culture, schools have fertilized the soil in which Islamic extremism develops and flourishes unimpeded.

No one can deny that France is under Islamist siege. Last week, France’s intelligence service discovered another terror plot. But what is the priority of the Socialist government? Restricting freedom of expression for pro-life “militants.”

Under this politically correct dictatorship, Western culture has established two principles. First, freedom of speech can be restricted any time someone claims that an opinion is an “insult.” Second, there is a vicious double standard: minorities, especially Muslims, can freely say whatever they want against Jews and Christians.

There is no better ally of Islamic extremism than this sanctimony of liberal censorship: both, in fact, want to suppress any criticism of Islam, as well as any proud defense of the Western Enlightenment or Judeo-Christian culture.

Twitter, one of the vehicles of this new intolerance, even formed a “Trust and Safety Council.” It brings to mind Saudi Arabia’s “Council for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.”

Under this political correctness, the only “win-win” is for political Islam.

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Erdogan’s Gritted-Teeth Peace with Israel Equates IDF with Hitler by Burak Bekdil

By on December 6th, 2016

In Istanbul, where a majority of Turkey’s 17,000 Jews live, unknown people recently started hanging posters in a posh district. The posters call on Muslims “not to be fooled by the missionary activities of Jew-servant Jehovah’s Witnesses.” They say: “These people are trying to destroy the religion of Islam.” Signed: Sons of Ottomans.

Erdogan’s ideological hostility to the Jewish state and his ideological love affair with Hamas have not disappeared.

Erdogan thinks that Israel’s military action in response to Hamas’s rockets indiscriminately targeting Israeli citizens is no different than the murder of six million Jews by a lunatic. “There is no point in comparing and asking who is more barbaric,” Erdogan concluded. In other words, Erdogan thinks that Hitler and the Israel Defense Forces are “equally barbaric.”

Yes, blessed are the peacemakers. Nevertheless, the Turkish-Israeli “peace” may not be easy to sustain.

Modern Turkey has never been so disconnected from its Western allies. Its Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, recently accused the West of helping the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). His evidence? Because, he said, ISIS is fighting with Western weapons — overlooking, of course, that they were probably captured or stolen.

This dislike and hostility is not unrequited. On November 24, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly for a motion calling to suspend Turkey’s membership talks with the European Union (EU), citing “disproportionate, repressive measures” taken by Erdogan’s government. The motion, although non-binding, passed 479 to 37 in favor. In retaliation, Erdogan threatened that “if the EU goes further,” Turkey will open its border gates and let refugees stream toward Europe.

The Turks, too, are distancing themselves from the idea of EU membership. According to a survey by the pollsters ANDY-AR, 75.3% of Turks believe that their country is drifting away from accession, while only 19.9% believe it is not. Forty-four percent think freezing membership talks would be a positive development.

Confirming the growing anti-Western mood, Erdogan’s spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin, wrote in a newspaper column: “With its internal problems, micro-nationalisms and the Brexit process, Europe is narrowing down its strategic outlook and losing its relevance.”

Against this backdrop, Turkey is normalizing its relations with Israel — in theory, at least. Ankara and Jerusalem agreed to appoint ambassadors to each other’s country after an absence of more than six years. Two prominent career diplomats, Kemal Okem and Eitan Na’eh, will struggle to improve ties in Tel Aviv and Ankara, respectively. They will have a hard job. The diplomats may be willing, but with Erdogan’s persistent Islamist ideological pursuits, they would seem to have only a slim chance of succeeding.

Turkey’s dwindling Jewish community is uneasy over increasing signs of anti-Semitism in an increasingly Islamized country. In Istanbul, where a majority of Turkey’s 17,000 Jews live, unknown people recently started hanging posters in a posh district. The posters call on Muslims “not to be fooled by the missionary activities of Jew-servant Jehovah’s Witnesses.” They say: “These people are trying to destroy the religion of Islam.” Signed: Sons of Ottomans.

Feeling unsafe, more than 2,500 Turkish Jews have recently applied for Spanish citizenship, and hundreds applied for Portuguese citizenship. Only last year, 250 Turkish Jews emigrated to Israel. That being the case, Islamist Turks are warning their fellow Muslims against missionary activities of Jehovah’s Witnesses who are, according to them, “servants of Jews.”

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Trump Assembling Team of Fierce Iran Deal Opponents New national security team has record of confronting Tehran Adam Kredo

By on December 6th, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump has been assembling a national security team stacked with fierce opponents of last year’s comprehensive nuclear deal with Iran, signaling what is expected to be a major departure from the Obama administration’s final bid to preserve the deal before leaving office, according to multiple sources familiar with Trump’s transition plans.

Trump has been installing well-known opponents of the deal to key national security posts for the incoming administration, including at the White House National Security Council, the CIA, and the Department of Defense.

This includes his selection of retired Marine Gen. James Mattis as secretary of defense, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) as CIA director, and retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser, picks that have won plaudits for their vocal opposition to the nuclear deal.

“It’s no secret that Flynn considers Iran to be the linchpin of a global alliance of hostile rivals seeking to undermine American interests,” said once source familiar with the backroom talks about future national security picks. “He was in the Middle East during the Iraq war and knows first-hand how Iranian proxies killed hundreds of American troops, and he has seen the intelligence showing that they’ve targeted Americans around the world.”

“As long as Iran keeps acting like an enemy of the United States, his NSC will accurately convey that to the president, and he’s building a staff that will make sure of that,” the source added.

Other recent national security picks include KT McFarland, a longtime national security analyst and commentator who has vocally criticized Iran and the nuclear deal, and Yleem Poblete, who served for nearly two decades as a senior staffer for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

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Erdogan’s Syrian U-Turn By:Srdja Trifkovic |

By on December 6th, 2016

On November 29 Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan raised many eyebrows when he declared that Turkey’s military involvement in Syria, which started in the last week of August, had the objective “to end the rule of the tyrant al-Assad who terrorizes with state terror.” He even added that Turkey did not intervene there “for any other reason.”

Only two days later Erdogan completely reversed his position. Speaking in Ankara on December 1, he said that Turkey’s military operation in Syria was not directed “against any country or person,” but only against terror organizations. “No one should doubt this issue that we have uttered over and over,” he went on, “and no one should comment on it in another fashion, or try to misrepresent its meaning.”

Both statements were made with emphatic clarity. They were remarkably contradictory even for a politician well known for unpredictable moves. One possible explanation for Erdogan’s volte-face is the pressure from Moscow, which has been supporting Bashar with air operations since September 2015. The issue was reportedly raised in Erdogan’s telephone conversation with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin on November 30, and at the meeting of the two countries’ foreign ministers in the Turkish coastal resort town of Alanya on the same day.

In view of his strained relations with Washington and Brussels in the aftermath of last July’s coup attempt, and the ensuing radical purge of real, potential, or imagined enemies, Erdogan is keen to maintain his rapprochement with Russia. He initiated it last July, after an eight-month freeze that followed the shooting down of a Russian bomber by Turkish F-16s over northern Syria just over a year ago. In addition to the political imperative of broadening his diplomatic options, Erdogan is keen to avoid further losses to the Turkish economy—amounting to tens of billions of dollars—which had resulted from the cancellation of Russian trade, construction, and package tour contracts.

As it happens, neither stated reason for Turkey’s intervention in Syria is true. Erdogan’s real motive in launching “Operation Euphrates Shield” was to prevent the establishment of a Kurdish de facto statelet along Syria’s border with Turkey, and specifically to push back its strategically significant foothold west of the Euphrates River. This zone included the city of Manbij, which the Kurds had taken after heavy fighting against the Islamic State earlier last summer. The Obama administration went out of its way to prevent any further clashes between the Turkish army and the YPG (People’s Protection Units, the Syrian Kurdish militia), earning neither side’s gratitude but initially managing to keep them apart. An uneasy truce had prevailed between them until recently, allowing the Kurds to focus on battling the IS while the Turks were sitting tight in their limited, 2000 square mile occupation zone. Tensions have resurfaced recently, however, with Turkey and its local allies (a few hundred members of the misnamed “Free Syrian Army”) seeking to establish control over the disputed city of al-Bab.

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Michael Galak Castro Dead. Hooray!

By on December 6th, 2016

Fidel’s popularity, I suspect, was due largely to the cinematic good looks of a testosterone-dripping alpha male, rather than his accomplishments. So, whatt were his achievements? What did Fidel Castro bring to the world to prompt such eulogies and admiration? What did he leave behind? Nothing but tides of blood and tears.
The ancient Romans had a saying – De mortuis nihil nisi bonum – about the dead, say either nothing or good. Hard as I tried, I was not able to do either. Progressives the world over, when describing the achievements of Fidel Castro, Hero of the Soviet Union, who died at the ripe old age of 90, have been dripping tears of loss, admiration and grief. The words used in such eulogies range from fiery to passionate, and include “charisma”, “ideals”, “belief” and many superlatives in between.

Let me give you my perspective, that of a former USSR citizen. Picture the port of Odessa in the early Sixties. The Caribbean missile crisis has just ended. The Odessa port workers, the very same proletarians, purportedly bound by class solidarity with the oppressed of the world, refuse to load grain onto a cargo ship bound for Cuba. Quite possibly, because of the chronic food shortage in the motherland of the world proletariat, this grain had been bought in capitalist Canada of the US, shipped to the USSR and then consigned to be shipped once again, this time back across the Atlantic to feed the revolution in Cuba. The wharfies sing a ditty, very poplar in Odessa at the time. It is a parody of a revolutionary Cuban song much beloved by disseminators of official Soviet propaganda:

Cuba, return our bread,
Cuba, take back your sugar,
Cuba, why don’t you go away and get f…ed,
Cuba, you’re such a loser

It was such a politically incorrect, counter-revolutionary ditty that the port area was immediately surrounded by the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ uniformed enforcers and the ‘ringleaders’ summararily arrested. There are no prizes for guessing what happened to them. I suspect that there were no ringleaders as such. Those dragged away were simple stevedores, struggling to feed their families in the semi-starving Soviet Union of Khrushchev times, and outraged that, instead of nourishing their own children, the food they were loading was destined for ‘the bearded maniac’.

Oh, Fidel Castro was popular with some, alright, but his popularity, I suspect, was largely due to the cinematically exotic good looks of a testosterone-dripping alpha-male, rather than his politics and accomplishments. So, what were his accomplishments and goals? What did Fidel Castro bring to the world? What, in short, did he leave behind?

I will not recount Castro’s bio – anyone remotely interested can find plenty of information. I’d like to start from January 1, 1959, when the rebels of his rag-tag army rolled into Havana and declared Cuba free – Cuba Libre! Freedom and cigars for everyone! Yippee! Hurray!

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WHO IS MANUEL VALLS? HE SAID “FRANCE WITHOUT JEWS IS NOT FRANCE” AFTER TERRORIST ATTACK IN JANUARY 2016

By on December 6th, 2016

Just a reminder…..

http://www.timesofisrael.com/france-without-jews-is-not-france-french-pm-says-at-hyper-cacher/

‘France without Jews is not France,’ French PM says at Hyper Cacher

At a ceremony Saturday evening commemorating the four victims of a jihadist attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the thought of Jews leaving France because they no longer feel it is their home was “an unbearable idea.”

Valls, speaking outside the Hyper Cacher supermarket, said France without its Jewish community was “not France” and vowed to fight anti-Semitism in all its forms.

Nothing, he said, could explain an attack by a Frenchmen on fellow citizens. “Nothing can explain the killing at outdoor cafes. Nothing can explain the killing in a concert hall. Nothing can explain the killing of journalists and police. And nothing can explain the killing of the Jews! Nothing can ever explain it,” he called, to cheers from the crowd.

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