Confiscating Books in Sweden by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16308/sweden-confiscating-books

The confiscation of books and the upcoming case against author and comedian Aron Flam has ignited a debate in Sweden about the value of freedom of speech. As Flam has pointed out, a Swedish writer who happens to be Jewish having his books, critical of Swedish-Nazi collaboration during the war, seized by the Swedish state is a bit ironic.

Uppsala, once a picturesque and peaceful university town, is now the town in Sweden with the most shootings per capita. “The gangs have been allowed to grow” Manne Gerell, a criminologist at Malmö University told SVT Nyheter in December 2019, adding that the police had “woken up” a little too late.

Perhaps it is time for Sweden’s government to spend fewer resources on prosecuting the speech crimes of pensioners and comedians, and more on fighting violent crime.

In June, four armed Swedish police officers seized and confiscated the entire stock of the book Det här är en svensk tiger (“This is a Swedish Tiger”), written by Swedish author and standup comedian, Aron Flam. The book tells the story of how Sweden’s claim of neutrality during World War II covered up a reality of Swedish collaboration with the Nazi war effort and the profits that the Social Democratic government made from the war.

The title of the book is a play on the words of a 1941 wartime poster of a tiger drawn in the blue and yellow colors of the Swedish flag with the title “En svensk tiger” (“A Swedish Tiger”) and made by Swedish illustrator Bertil Almqvist. The word “tiger” in Swedish means tiger, but it also means to keep silent. The original poster was part of a Swedish government campaign to warn Swedes to keep silent, presumably not to rattle Sweden’s wartime relationship with Nazi Germany.

The UN and EU’s Silence on Iran’s “Shocking Human Rights Violations” by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16469/iran-human-rights-violations

Last week, the Iranian regime’s Supreme Court issued two death sentences to wrestling champion Navid Afkari, along with six-and-a-half years in prison and 74 lashes, according to Persian-language news broadcaster Iran International. His two brothers were also arrested; Vahid Afkari was given a prison sentence of 54 years and 74 lashes, and Habib Afkari received 27 years and 74 lashes.
“For around 50 days I had to endure the most horrendous physical and psychological tortures… They would place a plastic bag on my head and torture me until I suffocated to the very brink of death. They also poured alcohol into my nose.” — Navid Afkari, Iranian wrestling champion, in a letter.
You would think that the EU or the UN would at least condemn the ruling mullahs of Iran for this brutality. Instead, they reward the regime. On August 14, the UN Security Council voted to allow the 13-year arms embargo on the Iranian regime to expire in October 2020. The ruling means that the ruling mullahs of Iran will be permitted to buy, sell and export as many conventional weapons they wish.
The ruling mullahs now have enough enriched uranium to refine and build a nuclear bomb if they wish to do so. Approximately 1000 kg of uranium enriched at just 5% can be further refined to create one nuclear bomb.
The UN and the EU need to hold the Iranian leaders accountable, or be discarded for irrelevance, where they appear to belong.

The Iranian regime has significantly ratcheted up its human rights violations. The United Nations and the European Union, which preach about human rights, completely turn a blind eye to the regime’s abuses.

A pitifully ‘overworked’ FBI lovebird By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/a_pitifully_overworked_fbi_lovebird.html

Now here’s a fresh whopper from the bowels of the Deep State.  According to the Daily Caller:

Former FBI official Peter Strzok defended the bureau’s surveillance of former Trump aide Carter Page in an interview aired Sunday, attributing failures found in a government watchdog report to agents being “overworked.”

“I don’t think at all that it’s anything improper. You get people who are overworked, who make mistakes — and don’t get me wrong, inexcusable mistakes,” Strzok said in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning.”

Strzok, the former FBI deputy chief of counterintelligence, was asked about a Justice Department inspector general’s report that blasted the FBI for a series of errors and omissions in applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Carter Page.

The IG found 17 “significant” errors in the FISA applications, including omissions of exculpatory evidence and failure to investigating information in the infamous Steele dossier.

This is downright comical.

Befuddled Jews Endorse Black Lives Matter by Rael Jean Isaac

https://spectator.org/jewish-organizations-endorse-black-lives-matter/

In this view, opposition to BLM is a product of Antisemitism.
On August 28, strange bedfellows, comprised of over 600 Jewish mainstream organizations and synagogues along with anti-Zionist Jewish groups and grouplets, published a full-page ad in the New York Times under the title “We Speak with One Voice When We Say, Unequivocally: Black Lives Matter.” The incoherent and inaccurate document — virtually everything it said about BLM was wrong — speaks volumes about the sad state of the American Jewish community, whose motto is apparently filmmaker Federico Fellini’s adage: “Don’t tell me what I’m doing; I don’t want to know.”

To dispose first of the ad’s identification of BLM as “the current day Civil Rights movement in this country … our best chance at equity and justice.” The goal of the original civil rights movement could be summed up in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” On the contrary, Black Lives Matter wants whites to be judged solely by the color of their skin — which supposedly ineradicably brands them as privileged racists. Only black lives matter (note the fury unleashed on anyone who dares to declare that all lives matter) and then only the tiny sliver of black lives taken by whites, above all white policemen. In the large number of ordinary black lives taken by black criminals BLM displays a blank disinterest.

Swept up in the fashionable moral panic following George Floyd’s death, in a mad rush to show their superior virtue, Jews stampeded onto the Black Lives Matter bandwagon, heedless of where they were headed.

The Times ad also compares the “conspiracy theories” used by “white supremacists” in the past, including billboards “smearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist” to politicians currently “deliberately manufacturing fear” of BLM. But BLM makes no secret of its anti-capitalist fervor. It was founded in 2013 by three black women: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. In 2015, Cullors stated on video, “We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular, we’re trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.” Garza openly reveres Joanne Chesimard (who now calls herself Assata Shakur), the Marxist revolutionary, former Black Panther and convicted killer of a New Jersey state trooper. For the past 41 years Shakur has been a fugitive sheltered by Communist Cuba. As for the third of the trio, Opal Tometi, she also referred to Shakur as “dear exiled sister” at a “summit” organized by Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, with whom she is photographed.

Lincoln and the Gates of Hell Eileen F. Toplansky

NO URL

Will the fabric of freedom prevail against the gates of hell as the lawless mob gains ascendancy in the country?

It was a question that Abraham Lincoln posed in January 1838 in his address titled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” and it is poignantly relevant now as it was then.

His concern was how to fortify Americans against the danger that might beset the country — not from “abroad” but rather from within.  Thus, “if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

More prescient words could not have been written as our country is currently torn into ugly camps.  There is “something of ill-omen amongst us” and it is “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country.”  In today’s America, judges are deliberately thwarting the law–consider the travesty wrought upon General Flynn.  Even though a federal appeals court ordered the criminal case against Michael Flynn to be dropped, U.S. district judge Emmet Sullivan has yet to dismiss the case. Mark Levin in his Men in Black has long warned us about the dangers of activist judges whose judicial tyranny thwarts the Constitution in favor of liberal policies.

As if he were watching the news of today, Lincoln spoke of  “accounts of outrages committed by mobs, [that] form the every-day news of the times. They [had] pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana [.]”  We need look no further than Portland, or Kenosha, or Washington, DC; Chicago and New York City as accounts of destruction, looting, murder, disregard for police, property, and peaceful gatherings occur yet Democrat leaders and followers cheer on the malevolence.

Malawi to open embassy in Jerusalem, making it first African country in Israel’s capital By Josh Plank

https://worldisraelnews.com/malawi-to-open-embassy-in-jerusalem-making-it-first-african-country-in-israels-capital/

“Looking forward to continue advancing with your government this important goal and our relations,” said Oded Joseph, Israel’s ambassador to Malawi.

Lazarus Chakwera, president of the southeastern African country of Malawi, announced his plan to open an embassy in Jerusalem during a State of the Nation address to the Malawian parliament on September 4.

“My administration recognizes that foreign relations have a significant role to play in promoting the socioeconomic development and growth of Malawi,” Chakwera said.

Lazarus Chakwera, president of the southeastern African country of Malawi, announced his plan to open an embassy in Jerusalem during a State of the Nation address to the Malawian parliament on September 4.

“My administration recognizes that foreign relations have a significant role to play in promoting the socioeconomic development and growth of Malawi,” Chakwera said.

“Our focus on the world stage will be reforming the foreign affairs ministry headquarters and its missions abroad so that our embassies are able to deliver on the ambitious objectives of promoting Malawi’s national interests globally,” he said.

Emperor’s New Clothes, Anyone? Joan Swirsky

https://canadafreepress.com/article/emperors-new-clothes-anyone

Every night for over 100 days, the entire American (and international) public has seen the criminals of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa getting away not only with arson and theft and assault and harassment, but murder.

While this or that reporter stands directly in front of a government building or independent black- or white-owned business that has been set on fire, with flames soaring into the sky, and the sound of gunfire causes that reporter to flinch, duck, or run for cover, he or she insanely and steadfastly maintains that We the People––the highly intelligent American public––are not seeing what is right before our eyes!

When the leftist media tell us that the “protests” we’re seeing in dozens of Democrat-run cities throughout our country are “peaceful,” do these media lackeys really think we’re that stupid…or blind?

Every day and night for all these months, we’ve seen these bought-and-paid-for leftist media whores try to convince us that up is down, black is white, bad is good. Just a small sample of these electronic and print media fakes include:

CBS-TV
NBC-TV
ABC-TV
MSNBC-TV
CNN-TV, et al …
NPR radio…
The NY Times
The Washington Post
The Los Angeles Times
The Chicago Sun-Times, et al.

 

Emperor’s New Clothes, anyone?

DESPERATELY DERAILING TRUMP: VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/06/desperately-derailing-donald/

The effort to stop President Trump is growing comical.

One always expects the media surprise leak of a purported hidden scandal as a presidential campaign winds down. Remember the last-minute “discovery” of George W. Bush’s undisclosed 24-year-old DUI arrest in 2000? Or the October 7, 2016 effort of the Washington Post to publish the hoarded 11-year-old “Access Hollywood” tape, just two days before Donald Trump’s second debate with Hillary Clinton?

We should expect lots of these “bombshells” and “walls are closing in” pseudo derailments. Except Trump has been the most widely investigated, probed, attacked, and smeared president in history. And so the scandal-field has pretty well been picked over, as those fired like Omarosa Manigault Newman, Anthony Scaramucci, John Bolton, and others have long ago more or less lectured us that Trump is nuts, crazy, dangerous, stupid, ignorant, and so forth. 

In terms of bombshells, what does the Left do after the 2016 suit to decertify voting machines, the FISA court abuse, the effort to sabotage electors’ votes, the first impeachment drive, the Logan Act gambits, the Emoluments Clause joke, the 25th Amendment ruse, the Russian collusion hoax, the 22-month-asleep-at-the-wheel Mueller and his “all-stars,” Ukraine! Ukraine!, the second impeachment drive, and the 2020 trifecta of Trump as Typhoid Mary, Bull Connor, and Herbert Hoover?

The point is, in Jussie Smollett fashion, the demand for scandals is outrunning the supply and time grows short. 

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Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using “Confirmed” to Mean its Opposite Outlets claiming to have “confirmed” Jeffrey Goldberg’s story about Trump’s troops comments are again abusing that vital term. Glenn Greenwald

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/05/journalisms-new-propaganda-tool-using-confirmed-to-mean-its-opposite/

EXCERPT

It seems the same misleading tactic is now driving the supremely dumb but all-consuming news cycle centered on whether President Trump, as first reported by the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, made disparaging comments about The Troops. Goldberg claims that “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day” — whom the magazine refuses to name because they fear “angry tweets” — told him that Trump made these comments. Trump, as well as former aides who were present that day (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and John Bolton), deny that the report is accurate.

So we have anonymous sources making claims on one side, and Trump and former aides (including Bolton, now a harsh Trump critic) insisting that the story is inaccurate. Beyond deciding whether or not to believe Goldberg’s story based on what best advances one’s political interests, how can one resolve the factual dispute? If other media outlets could confirm the original claims from Goldberg, that would obviously be a significant advancement of the story.

Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”

In other words, all that likely happened is that the same sources who claimed to Jeffrey Goldberg, with no evidence, that Trump said this went to other outlets and repeated the same claims — the same tactic that enabled MSNBC and CBS to claim they had “confirmed” the fundamentally false CNN story about Trump Jr. receiving advanced access to the WikiLeaks archive. Or perhaps it was different sources aligned with those original sources and sharing their agenda who repeated these claims. Given that none of the sources making these claims have the courage to identify themselves, due to their fear of mean tweets, it is impossible to know.