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Syria: Geopolitical Tragedy by Amir Taheri

Posted By on October 24th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17874/syria-geopolitical-tragedy

[W]hat is planned isn’t the actual writing of a new constitution but “drafting” unspecified “reforms” to a non-existent constitution. If this sounds like diplomatic gesticulation, don’t be surprised because it is exactly that.

Syria today isn’t a constitutional problem.

[W]hat is still lacking is a clear American strategy for reviving Syria as a nation-state, the only outcome that can contribute to regional peace and help the long-term interests of the United States and its allies. Without US leadership, the European powers won’t be able to play the crucial role they could and should claim in helping end the Syrian tragedy.

If Syria is recognized for what it is, that is to say an ungoverned territory, the UN’s role would have to help restore sovereignty to the Syrian people who should have the final say on how they wish to be governed and by whom. And that can’t be done by diplomatic gesticulations in a hotel suite in Switzerland.

Desperately trying to retain a modicum of relevancy in the Syrian imbroglio, the United Nations has shaken an old ghost out of slumber to claim a few headlines. The UN Special Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, has brought the so-called “Constitution Committee” out of its two-year hibernation to “start drafting for constitutional reform.”

Notice the words “to start”, “drafting” and “constitutional reform”. This means that after two years of real or imagined deliberation, the committee is no further than the starting point. Even then, what is planned isn’t the actual writing of a new constitution but “drafting” unspecified “reforms” to a non-existent constitution. If this sounds like diplomatic gesticulation, don’t be surprised because it is exactly that.

To reduce the role that the United Nations could potentially play in helping bring Syria out of the current deadly impasse to mere gesticulation is regrettable to say the least.

Syria today isn’t a constitutional problem.

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“The Basic Message Is Hatred”: The Persecution of Christians, September 2021by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on October 24th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17875/persecution-of-christians-september

“[T]he humanitarian crisis that is developing as the Taliban returns to power is likely to become a genocide against Christians if the Biden Administration does not act….” — Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, American Center for Law and Justice, August 27, 2021.
“[T]he possibility of there being a genocide against Christians in the wake of this withdrawal is extremely high. Already, the Taliban is compiling lists of known Christians and their communities. They are going door to door searching Afghan homes for Bibles, even searching smartphones for Bible apps.” — Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, American Center for Law and Justice, August 27, 2021.
“We allowed the Fulani Muslims who are migrants to settle among us on our lands for free. Now, Christians who welcomed and accommodated them have become targets of their attacks.” — Dominic Gambo Yahaya, local leader, Morning Star News, September 29, 2021, Nigeria.
“A human rights activist [Patrick George Zaki, a 30-year-old Christian graduate student] who wrote about his experiences as a Coptic Christian in Egypt has gone on trial on the charge of spreading false news.” — BBC, September 28, 2021, Egypt.
Anas Khalifa—for 20 years one of the most influential Salafist preachers in the nation—now calls Salafist Islam (fundamentalist Islam) “a cancer” and “a worldview that is spreading rapidly among young people.”…Anas also said that “They [Salafists] spread hatred against Christians and Jews, strong prejudices about other groups. The basic message is hatred.” — Anas Khalifa, influential Salafist preacher, svt.se, September 22, 2021, Sweden.

The following are among the abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of September 2021:

Muslim Slaughter of Christians

Afghanistan: Muslims linked to the Islamic State murdered four Christians. While trying to escape the country, a Christian family was intercepted by the jihadists. According to a local source:

“ISIS asked them, ‘we have tape about you that you are no longer Muslims. So is it true that you are not Muslim?’ They said, ‘Yes, we are not Muslims anymore. We are Christians.’ So the men of this family were killed at the spot. The children and women, they let them go.”

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Border Patrol Arrests Shatter All Records at Southern Border By Charlotte Cuthbertson

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/border-patrol-arrests-shatter-all-records-at-southern-border_4064208.html

Border Patrol agents apprehended a total of 1,666,167 illegal immigrants along the southwest border in fiscal 2021—breaking all records since 1925 after the agency was formed (when 22,199 illegal aliens were arrested).

An additional 294,352 were stopped after trying to enter at a port of entry without legal papers, bringing the total to almost 2 million (1,956,519) for fiscal 2021, according to new Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics.

The CBP doesn’t officially release the number of “gotaways”—illegal aliens who are detected by Border Patrol, but evade capture. However, former CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan told a congressional Republican roundtable on Oct. 20 that the gotaway number hit at least 400,000 illegal aliens this year.

The Biden administration has faced growing criticism for the crisis at the southern border, which started to ramp up a year ago in tandem with election rhetoric.

However, the number of illegal crossings shot up once Biden took office and promptly dismantled many of President Donald Trump’s border security measures.

In January, Biden paused deportations, stopped border wall construction, halted the Remain in Mexico program, repurposed Immigration and Customs Enforcement priorities, and reversed the ban on travel from terror-prone countries.

In December 2020, Trump’s last full month in office, Border Patrol agents arrested almost 74,000 illegal immigrants on the southern border. By July, that had almost tripled to 213,500.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is expelling most single adults under the Title 42 health directive policy issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March 2020 that calls for immediate expulsion of all illegal immigrants and non-essential travelers.

However, under Biden, the DHS stopped applying Title 42 to any unaccompanied children, most family units, and some adults.

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A Jet Blue Jihadist? The Great Press Cover-up by Chris Farrell

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17841/jetblue-jihadist

If we are trying to ascertain motive in a situation like this, shouting “Allah” would seem to be a key detail. That potentially moves the incident from “disturbed passenger freaks out over failed phone connection” to “jihadist tries to commit suicide attack.” It does not prove the latter case of course, but it does make it part of the conversation.

However, you would have to go to the FBI affidavit to get that detail. The Washington Post write up of the incident, clearly based on the affidavit, went so far as noting that El Dahr “yelled in Spanish and Arabic” but omitted that he was shouting about Allah — despite the obvious news value in that detail.

Granted there could be a variety of reasons why El Dahr was invoking his supreme being. But there is only one reason for not reporting it — deliberately to obscure a possible tie to Islamic radicalism.

If a radical Islamist hijacked an airplane, we might never know it was an act of terrorism. That is, if we rely only on the mainstream media.

Case in point: On September 22, Khalil El Dahr, a passenger on JetBlue Flight 261 from Boston to Puerto Rico, suddenly rushed to the front of the aircraft, choked and kicked a flight attendant, tried to break into the flight deck, and urged crew members to shoot him. It took a half-dozen flight attendants to restrain El Dahr, tying him down with flex cuffs, seat belt extenders and a necktie. On landing in Puerto Rico, El Dahr was arrested and charged with interference with flight crew members and attendants, a federal crime.

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Why Is No One Talking About FX’s ‘Impeachment’ Series? By Jack Cashill

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/why_is_no_one_talking_about_fxs_impeachment_series.html

Now that I am seven episodes in, I feel confident saying that “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” airing Tuesday evenings on FX, is the fairest and arguably the best real-life political drama Hollywood has ever produced.  What mystifies me is that no one on the Right appears to be talking about it.

The third in the “American Crime Story” series, this 10-part drama faithfully tracks the perjury and obstruction of justice scandal that very nearly ended the Bill Clinton presidency. While the first two in the series — “The People vs. O.J. Simpson” and “Versace” — dealt candidly with the issues of race and homosexuality, “Impeachment” takes candor a step further and deconstructs the Left’s revisionist history of Bill Clinton’s “sex” scandal.

The Bill Clinton character, served up with equal parts charm and menace by British actor Clive Owen, is something of a monster. When Paula Jones, played with minimal condescension by Annaleigh Ashford, testifies that Clinton exposed himself we believe her, not him. Her vivid description of Clinton’s royal member will not please the ex-president.

It is only in the seventh episode that the Hillary Clinton character, played — unconvincingly, alas — by Edie Falco of “Sopranos” fame emerges from the shadows. Although it is too early to tell, my guess is that Hillary will not like the portrait of herself as cold and controlling. That said, I expect the producers to pull their punches when it comes to revealing Hillary’s role in quelling the “bimbo eruptions” that threatened Clinton’s political career from the get-go.

Those “bimbos” — the Clinton term, not mine — include not just Paula Jones, but sexual assault victims such as Elizabeth Ward Gracen and Juanita Broaddrick, the latter of whom Clinton raped. (Viewers see Broaddrick briefly once in an early episode but will not see her again.)  When Bill ran for president in 1992, Hillary was instrumental in hiring private investigators to bribe and/or threaten these women into silence.

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Our Punchline-in-Chief By Charles C. W. Cooke

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/our-punchline-in-chief/

Joe Biden is, quite literally, a joke.

F . Scott Fitzgerald was incorrect when he averred that “there are no second acts in American lives.” But, if we tweak his aphorism just a little, we will arrive quickly at the truth: There are no second acts in American lives once the American in question has become a joke.

Joe Biden has become a joke.

I do not mean this as a sharp criticism, but quite literally. Joe Biden is a meme. He is a punchline. He is a source of mirth and amusement. Worse still, he is the subject of a series of jokes with which the apolitical and disengaged have become casually familiar. “Why,” I hear it asked, “has Biden fallen so far, so quickly in the public’s estimation, and why has he not recovered?” The answer to both questions is that he is inspiring the wrong response in the public at large. Disappointment can be addressed. Anger can be quelled. Suspicion can be dissipated. Ill fortune can be reversed. But mockery is another matter altogether: In politics, ridicule — that freewheeling cousin of contempt and derision — has a nasty habit of becoming permanent. “They laugh that win,” wrote Shakespeare. Indeed. And they who are laughed at, lose.

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National School Boards Association Apologizes for Letter Comparing Parents to Terrorists By Zachary Evans

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/national-school-boards-association-apologizes-for-letter-comparing-parents-to-terrorists/

The National School Boards Association has apologized for a letter that called on the Biden administration to investigate whether alleged threats against school-board members constituted domestic terrorism.

The NSBA Board of Directors apologized in a memorandum to members on Friday. The initial letter, sent on September 29, asked the administration to investigate whether alleged threats to school-board members, over masking policies and “propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory” in lessons, necessitated federal investigation.

“As you all know, there has been extensive media and other attention recently around our letter to President Biden regarding threats and acts of violence against school board members,” the memorandum states. “On behalf of NSBA, we regret and apologize for this letter. . . . There was no justification for some of the language included in this letter.”

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Transition to Nowhere California’s switch to a primarily solar and wind-powered grid is a dead end. Mark P. Mills

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/california-switch-to-primarily-solar-and-wind-powered-grid-is-dead-end

The leaders of California and China have at least one thing in common: fear of blackouts. In late September, following widespread and economically debilitating losses of power, China’s vice premier Han Zheng ordered the country’s energy companies to ensure sufficient supplies before winter “at all costs” and added, ominously, that blackouts “won’t be tolerated.” A month earlier, California governor Gavin Newsom issued emergency orders to procure more natural gas-fired electrical capacity to avoid blackouts. And in a possible sign of more such moves to come, earlier in the summer, California’s electric grid operator “stole” electricity that Arizona utilities had purchased and that was in transit from Oregon.

In recent weeks, the European continent has also suffered blackouts, near-blackouts, and skyrocketing electricity prices triggered by a massive lull in nature’s windiness. Grid operators across Europe rushed to buy fuel and fire up old gas- and coal-fired plants. Europe petitioned Russia for more natural gas, and German coal plants ran out of fuel, causing a scramble (including in China) to get more (doubling global prices). Even long-forgotten oil-fired powerplants were pressed into emergency service on grids from Sweden to Asia.

The issue that’s now front and center is whether all these disruptions to electricity supply and price are, to use Silicon Valley language, a “feature” or a temporary “bug” of the new energy infrastructure favored by advocates of renewables: one dominated by power from the wind and sun. Proponents of this so-called energy transition admit that the road to a post-hydrocarbon world might be rough. But the solution, they say, is to accelerate construction of far more wind and solar machines. Thus, the key question now is not whether we need such a transition, or even what it would cost, but whether it’s even possible in the time frames now being bandied about (“carbon free by 2035”).

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Sign of the Times When the media’s credibility collapsed, the New York Times led the way Batya Ungar-Sargon

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/sign-of-the-times-new-york-times/

The New York Times entered the digital era under duress. In 2011, the Times erected a paywall in what it called a ‘subscription-first business model’. The gamble was that readers would want to pay for quality journalism. It was a risk, and at first it didn’t seem to be paying off: after a challenging 2014, the company shed 100 people from the newsroom in buyouts and layoffs.

A.G. Sulzberger, who was getting ready to replace his father as publisher, commissioned an in-house report, its title ‘Innovation’. The report made it very clear who was to blame. A journalist’s job, the report said, no longer ended with choosing, reporting and publishing the news. To compensate for the ‘steady decline’ in advertising revenue due to digitization, ‘the wall dividing the newsroom and business side’ had to come down. The ‘hard work of growing our audience falls squarely on the newsroom’, the report said, so the Times should be ‘encouraging reporters and editors to promote their stories’.

Of course, journalists have always been aware who their readers are and have catered to them, consciously and unconsciously. But it was something else entirely to suggest that journalists should be collaborating with their audience to produce ‘user-generated content’, as the report put it. ‘Innovation’ presaged a new direction for the paper of record: become digital-first or perish.

The Times invested in new subscription services like NYT Cooking and NYT Games, and introduced live events, conferences and foreign trips. The paper hired an ad agency to work in-house and began allowing brands to sponsor specific lines of reporting. Journalists were asked to accompany advertisers to conferences and were pushed to collaborate more closely with the business side, something many of the old-school editors were loath to do. The executive editor at the time, Jill Abramson, resisted strenuously. She was given the boot.

And then came Trump.

As a candidate, Trump attacked the press as ‘the enemy of the people’, used the term ‘fake news’ and called the Times the ‘failing New York Times’. But the relationship between the press and Trump was symbiotic: Trump capitalized on the widespread feeling that the journalists chronicling American life looked down on regular people (he was not wrong). As he trashed the class norms of politesse that the press expected from a presidential candidate, the liberal media couldn’t get enough of him.

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What We Lose When We Lose Thomas Jefferson New York City takes down the author of the Declaration of Independence. Samuel Goldman

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-we-lose-when-we-lose-thomas?token=

After years of debate and a unanimous decision by New York City officials, the statue of Thomas Jefferson that has stood in the City Council chamber since 1915 is on its way out. Banished from official display, the seven-foot likeness will find its new home, likely in the New York Historical Society, by the end of the year.

The removal is disgraceful. Unlike monuments to Confederate leaders that display them in full military glory, Jefferson is depicted as a writer. Holding a quill pen in one hand and the Declaration of Independence in the other, he is clearly being honored for composing an immortal argument for liberty and equality. That is the accomplishment that the Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus, in a 2019 letter, called “the disgusting and racist basis on which America was founded.”

It is a fact known to all Americans that Jefferson didn’t live up to his own words. He owned more than 600 people over the course of his life. Unlike George Washington, moreover, he did not take even halting steps toward manumission. It’s little comfort that Jefferson recognized his own hypocrisy. “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?” Jefferson asked in his Notes on the State of Virginia. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.” 

The removal of the statue isn’t just an attack on Jefferson, though. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz put it: “The New York City Council hearing on Monday to remove a statue honoring Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence — a serious blow, especially to the most vulnerable among us, for whom Jefferson’s cry of equality is the last best hope.”