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Ruth King

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Double Games Of The UK Muslim Brotherhood by John Ware

By on February 28th, 2016

The tone was plaintive, almost bewildered. “We work tirelessly for the good of British society on several fronts,” Anas Altikriti protested before calling a press conference to refute the government’s charge that he and other like-minded Muslim leaders are doing the opposite.

A classified government review by two of Britain’s leading civil servants, expert in the Arab world and Islamist ideology, has concluded that organisations like the one Altikriti heads are, in effect, fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood — a charge they categorically deny.

The Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, as it is known in Arabic, was established in 1928 in Egypt and its goal was — and remains — the step-by-step Islamisation of Muslim communities with the ultimate aim of creating a global Caliphate ruled by holy law. “Allah is our objective” is the Brotherhood’s motto, “The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

With Altikriti on the platform was Omer El-Hamdoon, president of the Muslim Association of Britain, and Mohammed Kozbar, chairman of the Finsbury Park Mosque, North London, where the press conference was held. “We are not enemies of the state,” said the gently-spoken Hamdoon. All three say they “totally reject the allegation” that they are “in any way linked to the Muslim Brotherhood”.

Altikriti, in particular, has emphasised that he has “absolutely no links” and on its face his denial would seem to be consistent with the values of “tolerance” and “positive co-existence” which he says he is devoted to promoting. It’s certainly a vision a world away from the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, who sought the moral purification of Muslims, because he regarded them as having been infected by Western decadence. That and his belief that Jews were a major source of the infection help explain why he was an admirer of Hitler and why he translated Mein Kampf into Arabic, calling it My Jihad.

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Roger Franklin: The Guardian of the Inane

By on February 28th, 2016

Monocultures are prone to infirmity and disease, which perhaps explains The Guardian’s laughable attempt to characterise a journalist who believes in free speech as a witless promoter of anti-semitism. When everyone thinks the same, one fool’s braying is lost in the racket of the herd.
Like an elevator formerly occupied by a passenger afflicted with terminal flatulence, a visit to The Guardian Australia website serves as a sharp reminder that noxious emanations linger noisomely in small, tight, closed-off spaces. As Bertholt Brecht lamented of his contemporaries’ insistence on pouring their talents into the mundane when the workers’ paradise had yet to be realised, “They are like painters who cover the walls of sinking ships with still lifes.” Pardon the irony in quoting a red-raggin’ propagandist and totalitarian publicist in regard to a red-raggin’ publication with a pronounced affection for greenish jackboots, but the agit-propping dramatist’s observation is too delicious to resist. Here we are, the left’s march through the institutions long ago complete, yet in The Guardian’s strange and sealed little eco-system the same old battle cries and campfire songs echo yet. Suggest that journalists of the modern breed are bitchily contemptuous of free speech and intolerant of any opinions but their own, as the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann did last week in The Australian, and the truth of that observation is immediately confirmed by something akin to an eruption of explosive peristalsis. The offence against leftist presumption to solely determine what can be discussed and how, having been duly digested, prompts an immediate rumbling in the literary bowel until, after a period of authorial grimacing and discomfort, it spurts noisily forth in a gaseous bum burp as short on substance as it is foully obnoxious. Here, the effusions of former journalism academic and current Guardian contributor Jason Wilson come immediately to mind.

It is quite the case study, Wilson’s excoriation of Uhlmann, but very much of a piece with his earlier and no less gassy gushers. Not long ago, for example, he displayed a unique talent for finding perfidy in the prosaic by denouncing the faddish paleo diet as an assault on women and feminism. That expose should not be missed, especially by those who find amusement in the bizarre, but do set aside more than what might normally be considered adequate time to absorb a few hundred words of the merely tendentious. Some will laugh until they cry, and those tears will blur the vision as thoroughly as does the author’s compulsion to make everything, even plates of offal, symptoms of the right’s cleverly concealed and ever-sinister intentions. As a former Canberra University academic, Wilson cannot have worked in close proximity to Professor Matthew Ricketson, co-author of the infamous Finkelstein review, without having what seems a congenital inclination to useful idiocy greatly enhanced. The Finkelstein opus, it should be remembered, recommended the jailing of recalcitrant editors (see below), so there is another alleged journalist opposed to unfiltered free speech.

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France: Criticize Islam and Live under Police Protection by Giulio Meotti

By on February 28th, 2016

“After a few moments of fear, I thought that if there are these threats it is because my fight foiled the plans of the Muslim Brothers by bringing them to light. I decided not to give up.” — Laurence Marchand-Taillade, Secretary of the Parti Radical de Gauche.

Muslim organizations tried to defame his work work and name [Éric Zemmour] by accusing him of “Islamophobia” to silence him.

In France, hunting season is still open for critics of Islam.

“You are sentenced to death. It’s just a matter of time.” This message, in Arabic, was sent by Islamists to Laurence Marchand-Taillade, National Secretary of the Parti Radical de Gauche (Radical Party of the Left). She now lives under the protection of the French police.

Marchand-Taillade forced the Muslim Brotherhood to withdraw, under pressure from France’s Interior Ministry, its invitation of three Islamic fundamentalists to a conference in Lille. The Islamists in question were the Syrian Mohamed Rateb al Nabulsi, the Moroccan Abouzaid al Mokrie and the Saudi Abdullah Salah Sana’an, who deem that the penalty for homosexuality is death, that the international coalition against the Islamic State is “infidel,” that Jews “destroy the nations” and that only religious music is permitted.

Laurence Marchand-Taillade published an article in Le Figaro in which she called for the ban of these Islamists with their “anti-Semitic and pro-jihadist message.”

In the magazine Marianne, Marchand-Taillade then penned, along with the French-Algerian journalist Mohamed Sifaoui, an article calling for the resignation of the leaders of the Observatory of Secularism.

“I am the president of an association that supports secularism in the Val-d’Oise” said Marchand-Taillade to me in an interview,

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Turkey’s “Fall and Fall” by Burak Bekdil

By on February 28th, 2016

In reality, Turkey’s “post-modern Islamist” leaders were just Islamists gift-wrapped in a nicer package.

In a span of only seven months, more than 170 people have lost their lives in bomb attacks in Turkey. This number excludes more than 300 security officials killed by Kurdish militants, and more than 1000 Kurdish militants killed by Turkish security forces.

Russia is in the process of encircling Turkey militarily– in Syria, the Crimea, Ukraine and Armenia.

Russia’s fight is not about defeating the Islamic State, but about expanding its sphere of influence in the eastern Mediterranean, including the mouth of the Suez Canal. In a way, Russia is challenging NATO through Syria — the same way Turkey is challenging the Shiites through Syria, or Iran is challenging the Sunnis through Syria.

Less than a decade ago, many Western statesmen and pundits were racing ahead to praise Turkey’s Islamist leaders as “post-modern, democratic, reformist, pro-European Union Islamists” who could play the role model for less democratic Muslim nations in the Middle East. It was “The Rise and Rise of Turkey,” as Patrick Seale put it in the New York Times in 2009.

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Israelis Who Support BDS Alex Grobman, Ph.D.

By on February 28th, 2016

Those who believe no Israeli could possibly support the Boycott-Divestment-and Sanctions (BDS) movement, have not met Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset and head of the Jewish Agency who was once considered a candidate for Prime Minister of Israel. Mr. Burg has made clear that he supports a world-wide boycott of Israeli goods and products manufactured across the so-called Green Line, the name given to the demarcation established in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria after the Jewish State’s 1948 War of Independence.

Although Mr. Burg insists his position does not call for a total boycott of Israel, it is clear that this scion of a once-proud Zionist family (his late father, Yosef Burg, served in the Israeli cabinet for almost four decades) has thrown his lot in with those who no longer accept the idea of a Jewish State.

Now a member of the Israeli communist party, Hadash, Mr. Burg says “Zionism has been successfully completed,” and he no longer defines himself as a Zionist.

“Zionism was the scaffolding that facilitated the transition from the Diaspora to sovereignty. This scaffolding is superfluous now,” he told Yediot Ahronot, the Jewish state’s most widely circulated newspaper, last year.

Ending the Law of Return

He insists Israel would be better off getting rid of its own Law of Return, which allows all Jews throughout the world to come to Israel and claim citizenship, and concentrate more on implementing the so-called Palestinian Right of Return, a Palestinian demand that all Arabs who fled Israel in 1948 and 1967—and their descendants—be allowed to flood back into Israel proper, thus demographically destroying the Jewish state.

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Academic Drivel Report Confessing my sins and exposing my academic hoax. Peter Dreier See note please on this colossal academic hoax

By on February 28th, 2016

Peter Dreier is a leftist professor who confesses a colossal academic hoax…..rsk
Six years ago I submitted a paper for a panel, “On the Absence of Absences” that was to be part of an academic conference later that year—in August 2010. Then, and now, I had no idea what the phrase “absence of absences” meant. The description provided by the panel organizers, printed below, did not help. The summary, or abstract of the proposed paper—was pure gibberish, as you can see below. I tried, as best I could within the limits of my own vocabulary, to write something that had many big words but which made no sense whatsoever. I not only wanted to see if I could fool the panel organizers and get my paper accepted, I also wanted to pull the curtain on the absurd pretentions of some segments of academic life. To my astonishment, the two panel organizers—both American sociologists—accepted my proposal and invited me to join them at the annual international conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science to be held that year in Tokyo.

I am not the first academic to engage in this kind of hoax. In 1996, in a well-known incident, NYU physicist Alan Sokal pulled the wool over the eyes of the editors of Social Text, a postmodern cultural studies journal. He submitted an article filled with gobbledygook to see if they would, in his words, “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” His article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue), shorn of its intentionally outrageous jargon, essentially made the claim that gravity was in the mind of the beholder. Sokal’s intent was not simply to pull a fast-one on the editors, but to challenge the increasingly popular “post-modern” view that there are no real facts, just points-of-view. His paper made the bogus case that gravity, too, was a “social construction.” As soon as it was published, Sokal fessed up in another journal (Lingua Franca, May 1996), revealing that his article was a sham, describing it as “a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense … structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics.”

Sokal’s ruse was more ambitious than mine. He wrote an entire article. I simply wrote a 368-word abstract. He submitted his for publication. I just submitted mine to a conference. Although his paper was filled with absurd statements, it actually reached a conclusion—however bogus—that gravity was still an idea open to serious debate. In doing so, Sokal actually had a serious point to make about the silliness of much “post-modern” thinking that viewed science as a version of the humanities where all views should be given equal weight.

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MY SAY: NO HOPE FOR THE GOP IF THE CHANGELING BECOMES THE NOMINEE,

By on February 27th, 2016

Rich Lowry sums it up best:http://www.nationalreview.com/node/431947/print
The Coming Anti-Trump Onslaught
“If Trump romps to the nomination by mid-March, non-Trump Republicans will have lost to him in part through a lack of trying. That will never be true of the Democrats, who will gleefully and maliciously do the Trump vetting that the GOP race has, so far, been missing. ”

The anti-Trump onslaught is coming. Perhaps within weeks. Just not necessarily from Republicans. Almost as soon as Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee — which may be as early as March 15 — Democrats will surely start to churn out their negative ads. They will attack Trump’s credentials as a tribune of the little guy by focusing on a money-grubbing venture like Trump University, designed to extract as much cash as possible from people who thought they would learn something from the shell of a school.They will dissect his business record. They will fasten on his failed casinos and the bankruptcies he used to stiff creditors while maintaining a lavish lifestyle.They will fry him for hypocrisy on immigration by pointing out that Trump Tower was built by illegal Polish immigrants worked to the bone and that, according to news reports, illegal immigrants are helping build his new hotel in Washington.They will make the cheap threats he throws at anyone who crosses him a character and temperament issue. They will hound him about his unreleased tax returns. And, of course, they will use decades-worth of controversial statements to portray him as racist and sexist.

This will all be in the tradition of the early Democratic ad campaigns that successfully knee-capped Republican nominees in 1996 and 2012 (Bob Dole and Mitt Romney, respectively). A Democratic campaign to disqualify Trump would seek to make his unfavorable rating (already 60 percent with the general public) not merely alarming, but completely radioactive.

How will Trump fare against such ads? Maybe he will prove impervious to all such criticism, or maybe he will wilt under the assault. Who knows?

In this sense, Republicans are outsourcing the vetting of their front-runner to the other party. At this rate, they will make Trump their de facto standard-bearer in a little less than three weeks, never having run him through the paces of the painful testing that is usually inherent to the process.

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How to Stop Clinton and Trump By Deroy Murdock

By on February 27th, 2016

Can Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump get knocked off their respective monorails to the Democrat and Republican nominations? These front-runners are not necessarily unstoppable.

Clinton’s rival needs to paint a picture. Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist, Vt.) should ask Democrats and their media allies to imagine that it’s October 20. Clinton is locked in a competitive battle with Republican standard bearer Marco Rubio. Her campaign jet zips among Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other swing states. Early voting already has begun.

But Hillary cannot focus solely on the crowds that greet her. “What do you think Huma will say in court today?” one journalist shouts at her. Another yells: “Will the accusations against you disappear before Election Day?”

The next morning, Clinton herself is ordered to appear in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who was named to the bench by none other than Clinton’s husband. She is scheduled to answer questions in Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department. After Judge Sullivan granted discovery to the conservative watchdog group, and State’s inspector general subpoenaed the records of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, it’s no surprise when Clinton becomes ensnared in this burgeoning legal thicket.

Clinton suddenly vanishes from the hustings, huddles with criminal-defense attorneys, and calculates what to say in a federal courtroom on October 25 — a fortnight before Election Day.

Sanders should ask his massive crowds: “Is that how you want to spend the fall campaign?”

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Why President Trump Would Be a Bigger Disaster Than President Clinton By David Harsanyi

By on February 27th, 2016

There’s still time to turn it around, of course. But now that many conservatives are moving from the bargaining phase to the depression phase of the Kübler-Ross model, we can begin to grapple with the prospective reality of a Trump-versus-Hillary general election.

Whether you’re an ideological conservative, a proponent of limited government, or someone who believes that the president has too much power already, you shouldn’t think of this matchup as a contest between horrifying candidates. Rather, you should ask yourself which scenario would be more damaging. I’m pretty sure you’d find that Donald Trump is the form of the Destructor.

But Hillary Clinton is the worst, most evil liberal ever!

Yes. You can count on it. Clinton, as you may have noticed, does not have the charisma of Barack Obama. Not only would she be divisive and ethically compromised, but she would also galvanize the Right. Republicans would almost certainly unite against her agenda, which would be little more than codifying Obama’s legacy: a collection of policies that half the country still hates.

She won’t be able to pass anything substantial. The most likely outcome is another four to eight years of trench warfare in Washington, D.C., giving conservatives a pass for a number of winnable, state-level issues. There will probably be, if historical disposition of the electorate holds, a Republican Congress. (Who knows what happens to Congress if Trump is elected?) Hardly ideal. But unless you believe that an active Washington is the best Washington, gridlock is not the end of the world.

The myth that Democrats get everything will persist. But despite plenty of well-earned criticism, the GOP has been a more effective minority party than constituents give it credit for. People are frustrated, but the conservative idealists have been gaining ground since the tea party emerged. The tea party’s presence has put a stop to an array of progressive reform efforts that the pre-2010 GOP would surely have gone along with.

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Yes, Trump University Was a Massive Scam By Ian Tuttle

By on February 27th, 2016

Many people believe that higher education is a de facto scam. Trump University, Donald Trump’s real-estate institution, was a de jure one.

First thing first, Trump University was never a university. When the “school” was established in 2005, the New York State Education Department warned that it was in violation of state law for operating without a NYSED license. Trump ignored the warnings. (The institution is now called, ahem, “Trump Entrepreneur Initiative.”) Cue lawsuits.

Trump University is currently the defendant in three lawsuits — two class-action lawsuits filed in California, and one filed in New York by then-attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who told CNN’s New Day in 2013: “We started looking at Trump University and discovered that it was a classic bait-and-switch scheme. It was a scam, starting with the fact that it was not a university.”

Trump U “students” say the same. In his affidavit, Richard Hewson reported that he and his wife “concluded that we had paid over $20,000 for nothing, based on our belief in Donald Trump and the promises made at the [organization’s] free seminar and three-day workshop.” But “the whole thing was a scam.”

In fact, $20,000 is only a mid-range loss. The lead plaintiff in one of the California suits, yoga instructor Tarla Makaeff, says she was “scammed” out of $60,000 over the course of her time in Trump U.

How could that have happened? The New York suit offers a suggestion:

The free seminars were the first step in a bait and switch to induce prospective students to enroll in increasingly expensive seminars starting with the three-day $1495 seminar and ultimately one of respondents’ advanced seminars such as the “Gold Elite” program costing $35,000.

At the “free” 90-minute introductory seminars to which Trump University advertisements and solicitations invited prospective students, Trump University instructors engaged in a methodical, systematic series of misrepresentations designed to convince students to sign up for the Trump University three-day seminar at a cost of $1495.

The Atlantic, which got hold of a 41-page “Private & Confidential” playbook from Trump U, has attested to the same:

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