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Israel Upset at Belgium for Inviting ‘Terror Supporters’ to UN Security Council

Posted By on February 11th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/11/israel-upset-at-belgium-for-inviting-terror-supporters-to-un-security-council/

JNS.org – Israel is furious at Belgium for continuing to act against Israel at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), including inviting a “one-sided, radical” pro-Palestinian activist to address council members.

Belgium, who currently holds the rotating presidency for the UNSC, has invited Brad Parker, a senior official for a non-profit called Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P), to speak at the council’s session.

DCI-P accuses Israel of committing war crimes, supports the BDS movement and has ties to the US-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“Belgium has positioned itself as one of the Security Council member states most hostile toward Israel,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lior Haiat told The Times of Israel. “Inviting a one-sided radical activist such as Mr. Parker to brief the Security Council is yet another negative record.”

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Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s Dreyfus Christopher Akehurst ****

Posted By on February 11th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/02/cardinal-george-pell-australias-dreyfus/

The new legal year began this month with various ceremonies, among them the traditional celebration of a “Red Mass” in the Roman Catholic cathedrals of the state capitals. In Melbourne, the judges and lawyers who attended St Patrick’s must have pondered the strange combination of circumstances that have made that imposing Gothic building the alleged locus delicti of Australia’s most publicised and divisive legal case in living memory; and have seen Cardinal George Pell, the prelate whose archiepiscopal seat the cathedral once was, convicted for child sexual abuse – offences committed, it is said, in a sacristy just across the transept from the assembled jurists participating in the Mass.

The Pell case is one of those indicators, like climate change, of where one stands politically. The Left is pretty much anti-Pell en bloc, not so much for any privileged access to evidence, but because he is a conservative, someone who can therefore do no good – just like President Trump, who even if he could somehow fulfil the leftist dream and abolish “global warming” overnight would get no thanks for it. Those who have publicly stated their belief in Pell’s innocence tend to be conservative (Pell’s two most eloquent champions have been Keith Windschuttle, Editor-in-Chief of Quadrant, who has dissected the evidence with a forensic skill unusual even in the highest levels of the legal profession, and columnist Andrew Bolt) but they believe him not because of shared political or other views but because conservative thinking requires good reasons for its conclusions and is not swayed by shallow emotionalism and the shouts of the mob, and the evidence adduced against Pell is about as far from conclusive as any evidence accepted by an Australian court could ever have been.

On March 11, the full bench of the High Court will come together to hear the long awaited appeal by Pell, former Archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, then cardinal in charge of reforming (i.e. cleaning up) the finances of the Vatican, now prisoner no. CRN 218978 at Barwon, Victoria. When it does, the hearing will push whatever is obsessing the media at the time – coronavirus, the horrors of a Trump re-election, the collapse of the British economy after Brexit (that’ll be the wishfully thought-up fake news from the Nine media and the Guardian) off front pages round the world.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Attempted Illegal Border Crossings Drop to Eight-Month Low By Zachary Evans

Posted By on February 11th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/attempted-illegal-border-crossings-drop-to-eight-month-low/

Customs and Border Patrol announced on Tuesday that in January the agency recorded the fewest number of attempted illegal border crossings in eight months.

Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan told reporters at a press conference that the agency had apprehended or denied entry to 36,679 people in January, down from 144,116 people in May 2019. Of the 36,679, 29,200 were arrested by the Border Patrol, while the remainder were refused entry to the U.S. at border crossings.

Morgan said the decrease in attempted crossings was attributable to “successful” Trump administration policies.

The Trump administration’s policies have included measures intended to stem the flow of asylum-seekers to the U.S.-Mexico border, such as the “Remain in Mexico” directives requiring asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their cases are processed in the U.S. Migrants are sometimes returned to other Latin American countries if their cases are rejected by the U.S.

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The administration has also attempted to counter the phenomenon of sanctuary cities, where local governments instruct law enforcement not to cooperate with U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement. In the latest salvo against these policies, Attorney General William Barr announced Monday the Justice Department would commence a “significant escalation” in lawsuits against sanctuary cities for “unconstitutionally interfering” with immigration enforcement.

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Limbaugh: A Genius at Radio By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on February 11th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/rush-limbaugh-radio-genius-changed-political-landscape/

His ‘army of one,’ inspiring millions who’d been ignored, changed the political landscape.

Genius is often defined in myriad ways. One trusted criterion is the ability to do something extraordinary in a field where others could not — and doing something that perhaps will never be done again by anyone else.

By that measure, Rush Limbaugh certainly is the genius of talk radio, a genre in which he not merely excelled but that he also singlehandedly reinvented as something entirely different — and entirely more powerful and instrumental in American life — from what was imaginable pre-Limbaugh.

Even stranger still, his ascendance coincided with the presumed nadir of radio itself. It was supposedly a has-been, one-dimensional medium, long overshadowed by television. Even in the late 1980s, radio was about to be sentenced as obsolete in the ascendant cyber age of what would become Internet blogs, podcasts, streaming, and smartphone television.

Stranger still, Limbaugh has prospered through two generations and picked up millions of listeners who were not born when he first went national and who had no idea of why or how he had become a national presence.

He certainly did not capture new listeners by adjusting to the times. While tastes changed and the issues often metamorphosed, he did not. He remained conservative, commonsensical, and skeptical of Washington and those in it, as if he knew all the predictable thousand faces of the timeless progressive project, whose various manifestations reappear to mask a single ancient and predictable essence: the desire of a self-appointed group of elites to expand government in order to regiment the lives of ordinary people, allegedly to achieve greater mandated equality and social justice but more often to satisfy their own narcissistic will to power. It was Limbaugh who most prominently warned that lax immigration enforcement would soon lead to open calls for open borders, that worry about “global warming” would transform into calls to ban the internal combustion engine, and that the logical end of federal takeover of health care would be Medicare for All.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Why It’s Delusional To Think Higher Education Is Free From Indoctrination If academia shapes up to be the ideological opponent of more than half the population, conservatives will treat it as an enemy.By Sumantra Maitra

Posted By on February 11th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/11/why-its-delusional-to-think

Consider a thought experiment. Imagine we live in a reverse universe in which the population is overwhelmingly center-left on the major cultural and socioeconomic issues, and the institutional power in media and higher education is in the hands of the right wing.

In that universe, university applications are overwhelmingly meritocratic, admissions metrics include only academic qualification and aptitude and nothing else, the flow of knowledge is outright cut-throat, and if you fail, you perish. The system is Vulcan and absolutely hierarchic, and only the best of the best excel.

There’s no campus bureaucracy, no university “mental health counselors” for any fragile flower whose cat died, no campus sexual assault “courts” where the accused is already guilty, no university student unions led by outsider thugs, no federal loans for anyone willing to spend a few hundred thousand on a master’s degree about the connection between Maori tribal weaving patterns and post-colonial feminist movements. Most importantly, in this alternate reality, there is no forced push for the sameness known as equality.

Albeit this is an extreme scenario, it is not difficult to imagine what the left’s reaction would be. This system would not be allowed to continue.

Of course, it’s the exact reverse of our current reality. In two broadly center-right countries, the United Kingdom and the United States, cultural institutions are not just dominated by the left, they are increasingly becoming off-limits to conservatives. Consider the news from just last week: The Western Art History course at Yale was canceled, the 1619 Project was incorporated into public school curricula at Buffalo, military presence was banned at the Cambridge University freshers’ fair because it could be “triggering” for students who are “mentally unwell,” and a centuries-old student club was banned at Oxford for failing an identity politics quota.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Where’s the Outrage? Suspect Who Drove Van Into Trump Campaign Volunteers Admits Political Motive By Matt Margolis

Posted By on February 11th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/trending/suspect-who-drove-van-into-trump-campaign-volunteers-admits-political-motive/

On Saturday, 27-year-old Gregory William Loel Timm intentionally crashed his van into a tent where Trump campaign volunteers were registering voters Saturday afternoon in Jacksonville, Fla., in a Walmart parking lot.

After plowing through the tent with his van, Timm stopped, got out of the van, then took a video of the scene before flipping off the victims and fleeing. No one was injured during the incident.

The Republican Party of Duval County posted pictures of the scene on Twitter:

Within hours of the incident, William Loel Timm was arrested by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office on two counts of aggravated assault, criminal mischief, and driving without a license.

While Timm’s motive was obvious, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO) refused to say whether the assault was politically motivated.

“We’re obviously going to follow that up and we take that very seriously,” said JSO Lieutenant Larry Gayle. “Anybody who interrupts a political process in this country needs to be taken very seriously.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump steals the Dems’ spotlight at New Hampshire rally ‘We have the highest poll numbers we’ve ever had — thank you, Nancy, very much’ Amber Athey

Posted By on February 11th, 2020

https://spectator.us/trump-steals-dems-spotlight-new-hampshire-rally/

President Donald Trump successfully trolled Democrats once again Monday — hosting a packed rally the night before their New Hampshire primary election and successfully directing attention and energy away from Democratic campaigners desperate to interest voters.

The near-overflowing arena at Southern New Hampshire University stood in stark contrast to the sparsely attended campaign trail events put on just around the corner by Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and the rest of the Democratic field.

Bernie Sanders may have a rabid online fan base, but how many would camp out all night and day in the frigid February snow for a chance to see their political hero? Warren couldn’t even get hungry diners to glance up from their meals long enough to ask for their vote.

‘I LOVE Trump,’ a concession stand worker said enthusiastically as she doled out chicken tenders and fries to the hundreds of people lined up for food and drink. Attendees danced and sang along to classic rock anthems by Billy Joel and Elton John for hours before the president’s speech, putting Mayor Pete Buttigieg team’s ‘High Hopes’ dance to shame.

‘We have never had an empty seat from the day your future first lady and I came down the escalator,’ Trump said at the start of his speech, poking fun at the Democratic candidates relatively small crowds throughout the state. ‘We have so much more enthusiasm it’s not even close’.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

DEMS AND “WHISTLEBLOWING”TERRIBLE CANDIDATES, A PRIMARY CHALLENGE TO OCASIO CORTEZ

Posted By on February 11th, 2020

https://canadafreepress.com/article/democrats-playing-fast-and-loose-with-term-whi

Democrats Playing Fast and Loose with Term ‘Whistleblower’ to Launch Another Trump Investigation By Judi McLeod 

Sen. Chuck Schumer is off on yet another desperado Democrat Wild Goose Chase—this time calling on 74 Inspectors General to Investigate President Trump for “Retaliation Against Whistleblowers”.

“Retaliation Against Whistleblowers”?

Come off it Sergeant Schmuck!  There are no “whistleblowers” against whom to retaliate, only “leakers”.  In this case, Adam Schiff-appointed leakers like the one whose alleged name social media giant Google will not allow to stand.

“It’s odd the way each failed Democratic investigation into President Trump seems to segue into the next. A mere five days after President Trump’s acquittal, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) has called upon 74 inspectors general for “immediate action to investigate any and all instances of retaliation against whistleblowers.”

https://nypost.com/search/rich+lowry/

The Democrat Party Keeps Picking Terrible Candidates!Rich Lowry

After 2016, the Democratic establishment would have been justified in getting out of the business of presidential politics.

It swung so strongly behind Hillary Clinton that it discouraged any serious contenders from getting in the race. Her competition was a motley collection of people who didn’t get the message or didn’t care — including a no-hope socialist from Vermont named Bernie Sanders.

Because politics abhors a vacuum, Sanders became the anti-Hillary candidate and the leader of a movement that four years later threatens to take over the Democratic Party.

But that’s getting ahead of the story. Fortified by endorsements from anyone who mattered and the lockstep support of Democratic donors, with even the debate schedule fashioned to suit her ­interests, Hillary won the nomination as scripted — and proceeded to lose the general election to a ­rival who had a 37 percent approval rating on Election Day.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/11/michelle-caruso-cabrera-will-challenge-alexandria

Former CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera will challenge Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in House Democratic primary
Caruso-Cabrera, who became a CNBC contributor when she left the network in September 2018, serves as a member of the board of directors for financial services firm Beneficient. She will take a leave from her role as CNBC contributor for the duration of the campaign, a CNBC spokesperson said.

Former longtime CNBC correspondent and anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera filed late Monday to run for Congress in New York’s 14th District.
The seat is currently held by Democratic freshman firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Caruso-Cabrera will run as a Democrat in the primary this year.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Israeli left vs. Palestinian and Arab-world pragmatists Ruthie Blum

Posted By on February 11th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-israeli-left-vs-palestinian-and-arab-world-pragmatists/

Hearts that bleed for the enemies of Western democracy who subjugate their own people and terrorize everybody else are attached to heads in need of psychiatric examination.

In an attempt to downplay the role played by U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the attitudinal Arab-world shift—due mainly, but not exclusively, to a shared mission to halt Iran’s race to obtain nuclear weapons—the Israeli left had a gleeful “we told you so” moment at the beginning of the month, when the Arab League unanimously rejected the “deal of the century.”

At an emergency meeting held in Cairo on Feb. 1 at the behest of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, the pan-Arab bloc declared that Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan “does not meet the minimum rights and aspirations of Palestinian people,” and vowed not to cooperate with the United States to implement it. Among the nay-saying countries at the summit were the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain, each of which had sent representatives to Trump’s joint press conference with Netanyahu at the White House on Jan. 28.

To clarify the above about-face, an anonymous Arab diplomat told the left-wing Israeli daily, Haaretz, that Abu Dhabi, Muscat and Manama had been misled by Washington with a document stating that the plan included the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital as the basis for peace negotiations.

In other words, they were duped into accepting an invitation by the White House. Yeah, right.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: The Dangers of Singing by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on February 11th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15555/palestinians-danger-singing

The only songs Hamas and its followers want are those that promote hate and violence…. “I will eat you alive, tastes best without salt, Zionist – Yes, yes, you.”

The members of Sol Band did not call for “scattering the body parts” of Jews; that is probably why they are being targeted by Hamas and its allies in the Gaza Strip.

What is disturbing, however, is the silence of the international community, specifically the EU partners of Islamic University in Gaza, where Farra serves as a lecturer. Do the Europeans working with the university condone threats against musicians?… The EU countries and educational institutions are most likely ignoring such threats because they were not made by Israel.

The silence of the international community emboldens Hamas… and allows them to continue their repressive measures against Palestinians. It also allows Hamas and terror groups to continue calling for blowing up the skulls of Jews and eating them alive.

Palestinian musicians in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip are facing death threats after a Muslim scholar, Sheikh Mohammed Sliman al-Farra, published a fatwa (a legal opinion or ruling issued by an Islamic scholar) prohibiting a local band from performing.

Farra works for Islamic University of Gaza, a member of four regional and international associations of higher education, and has project partnerships with more than 130 European universities and research centers located in 21 EU countries.

Published on November 23, 2019, the fatwa targets Sol Band, a Palestinian music group established in the Gaza Strip eight years ago:

“The music group Sol Band, which has been roaming the streets of the Gaza Strip, has been violating God’s sanctities by promoting tabarruj (women dressing up immodestly in violation of Islamic teachings) and the mixing of the sexes… Their actions weaken the young men and encourage sinners. Indulging it leads to great corruption and evil and results in behavioral and intellectual deviation among young people. It is not permissible to promote or meet with them or listen to their songs, even if they are patriotic.”