ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Five Years Later, We Still Haven’t Learned from the Charlie Hebdo Massacre By David Harsanyi

Posted By on January 8th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/five-years-later-we-still-havent-learned-from-the-charlie-hebdo-massacre/

Giving a bunch of religious extremists or government bureaucrats veto power over our speech doesn’t make us safer. It just makes us less free.

Five years ago today, two French Islamists forced their way into the Paris editorial offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and began shooting. The journal’s offices had been moved to an unmarked building after they were hit by a 2011 firebombing in response to the publication of a satirical cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. The shooters managed to kill twelve people. A related attack soon followed in a kosher supermarket, where four Jews were murdered by a friend of the shooters.

Even today, the paper’s editor, who’s published offensive caricatures of popes and rabbis, lives under police protection for the crime of slandering Mohammed. Charlie Hebdo, whose circulation has dropped precipitously after an initial post-attack spike, is an ill-mannered slayer of sacred cows of a kind that, sadly, doesn’t exist in the United States. The only American enterprise I can think of that has a comparable openness to skewering all faiths is South Park, but even its excellent brand of satire is staid by comparison.

For a brief moment after attack, the free world rallied around Charlie Hebdo. “Je suis Charlie” became a global rallying cry. The massive march through the streets of Paris that followed included virtually every major world leader, including those hypocrites who are happy to clamp down on free expression in their own nations. One leader conspicuously, and embarrassingly, absent from the proceedings was the president of the United States, Barack Obama. He sent the U.S. ambassador to France instead.

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BARBAROUS IRAN IS THE REAL GREAT SATAN, BUT THE MORALLY BANKRUPT LEFT IS INCAPABLE OF ADMITTING IT RICHARD KEMP

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/colonel-richard-kemp/

‘Death to America! The great Satan!’ Predictable chants on the streets of Tehran following President Trump’s strike against Iranian General Qassim Soleimani. Comments by many political leaders in Britain suggest their own feelings may not be much different. Jeremy Corbyn’s reaction, in any case now politically irrelevant, was so predictable it can be passed over. The candidates to replace him also lined up to condemn Trump’s action, led by Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry who spoke of ‘Trump’s reckless lurch towards war’. Clive Lewis condemned ‘this cowboy action’.

Is it strategic naïveté that leads these people to side with Tehran over Washington? Ill-judged comments like this can only embolden Ayatollah Khamenei in his plans to retaliate against America. Desperate to split the EU further from the US, he knows the value of such backing, demanding that European leaders condemn President Trump.

These Labour politicians are far from alone, with academics and so-called experts in international law wheeled out in the media to accuse the US of acting illegally and even committing war crimes, despite ignorance of the intelligence that led to the attack order. At one point I expected the BBC to play martial music in the days immediately after Soleimani’s death, so sombre was their coverage of his funeral. Their correspondent in Beirut on Monday came across more like a spokesman for Tehran. Next maybe we should expect to see Soleimani transformed into an anti-imperialist icon, with Left-wing politicians donning t-shirts bearing his image Che Guevara-style.

BOOKS, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The National Book Foundation Defines Diversity Down written by Kevin Mims

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://quillette.com/2020/01/07/the-national-book-foundation-defines-diversity-down/

“Over the past decade, the National Book Foundation has honored works of fiction such as Great House, I Hotel, So Much For That, Binocular Vision, Refund, The Throwback Special, The Association of Small Bombs, and a lot of other books whose authors not one in 10,000 Americans can probably identify. Decades from now, when people look back on the Lisa Lucas era at the National Book Foundation, they may see a whole lot of ethnic diversity and not much more—except for a lot of forgotten and out-of-print titles.”

Last month the Huffington Post published an essay by Claire Fallon entitled “Was this Decade the Beginning of the End of the Great White Male Writer?” Fallon celebrated the notion that white men are losing their prominence in contemporary American literature and that the best books being published in America today are being written by a wider variety of authors than ever before:

“What was once insular is now unifying,” National Book Foundation director Lisa Lucas told the crowd at the 2019 National Book Awards Gala, where the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry honors all went to writers of color. “What was once exclusive is now inclusive.”

Lucas took over the foundation in 2016, at a time when the high-profile awards had a somewhat checkered record with representation. Though historically the honorees had skewed heavily white and male, that began to change around 2010. (However, there had been some other recent embarrassments, like 2014 host Daniel Handler’s racist jokes following author Jacqueline Woodson’s win for “Brown Girl Dreaming.”) Lucas, the first woman and person of color to helm the foundation, made representation and inclusivity a focus of her messaging.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Zinn Education Project: Teaching Trump-Hate and Other Dogma A decade after his death Howard Zinn lives on, propagandizing America’s youth. by Mary Grabar

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://spectator.org/the-zinn-education-project-teaching-trump-hate-and-other-dogma/

In December, the Zinn Education Project (ZEP), a non-profit co-founded in 2007 by William Holtzman, one of Howard Zinn’s Boston University students (class of 1974), to spread the lessons of Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States, excitedly announced in a fundraising appeal that his goal of signing up 100,000 teachers had been reached.

The effort to appear to be a legitimate educational organization supported by small donors was enhanced by Holtzman’s pledge of up to $15,000 in matching donations. Later, Dave Colapinto (class of 1982) promised to do as he had done in 2018, pledging $10,000. But the latest tax records on file show that for fiscal year 2016/2017 over $117,000 came from Holtzman and $100,000 came from the New Venture Fund, which hides donors like George Soros.

Nor is the organization educational in any meaningful sense, as evidenced by the solicitation’s claim that “Many of the students in high school today will be voting in 2020.” ZEP’s lessons are as un-political as Zinn’s tract, which for forty years has been spreading communist disinformation through wildly distorted quotations of sources, omission of critical evidence, and plagiarism, as I discovered in writing Debunking Howard Zinn. While Zinn lazily cut and pasted paragraphs from the historically suspect works of fellow radicals, he praised the Viet Cong by twisting the words of foreign service officer Douglas Pike to mean their opposite. In his book, Pike described the Viet Cong’s strategies as “agitprop” and accused them of “genocide.” Zinn said Pike claimed the Viet Cong were community builders helpfully teaching “communication” skills. My search through contemporaneous newspaper and magazine articles revealed that Zinn’s claims that the U.S. kept secret the World War II Japanese-American internment camps and that Vietnam War protestor Mary Moylan “was never found” after she refused “to surrender to the FBI” were patently false. It’s just a sampling of what I found.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Alarmed and Dangerous Peter Smith

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/01/alarmed-and-dangerous/

Can we all agree that it is getting hotter? Facts matter and there is no point in agreeing on something that is wrong. However, the evidence seems clear to me. We now have 41 years of satellite data. I think we can rely on Roy Spencer and John Christy at the University of Alabama in ensuring that the NASA satellite measuring program under their purview is throwing up honest data.

That data from the end of 1978 until the end of 2019 shows a trend warming of 0.013 degrees per year; in total 0.54 degrees over the forty-one years. At this rate the temperature would rise by 1.33 over a century. This would represent an acceleration in warming when compared with HADCRUT 4 data (land and ocean) which shows a trend of just 0.90 degrees over the whole period from 1850 to the near end of 2019.

But a degree of caution is warranted in saying that the last forty-one years is a guide to the future. I looked at the forty-one years from the end of 1899 to the end of 1940 (when the global temperature had a local peak) and found using HADRUT data that the temperature had risen by 0.40 degrees. This provided no guide at all to the next forty-one years, when the recorded temperature actually fell by 0.17 degrees. At the same time, to be clear, ‘up’ is the dominant theme since 1850.

Why there is warming is a separate question. Some look to the activity of the sun. I don’t know, I haven’t read anything convincing. Are the larger conglomerations of cities having heat-island effects? I assume so. A scientist friend of mine hypothesizes that world-wide large-scale irrigation may be contributing to water vapor in the atmosphere and thus may be part of the explanation. Again, I don’t know – which is what I would like a lot more people, more qualified than I, to be saying rather than stymieing debate by pretending that everything is certain and settled.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Killing of General Soleimani: Was it Right? J.R. Nyquist

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://jrnyquist.blog/2020/01/06/the-killing-of-general-soleimani-was-it-right/

There are many approaches to the subject of ethics. Aristotle said that we do not naturally possess goodness of character. Only by obedience to rules of valid conduct do we acquire such goodness. Does our national security establishment even know what goodness is? And was it right to assassinated General Soleimani?

Rightness of action, according to Aristotle, involves taking a middle path between a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess.

Now let us examine President Trump’s order to kill General Soleimani. As actions go, the killing partakes of the spheres of Fear and Confidence, Honor and dishonor (major), actuated through temper and truthfulness (or lies).

On the first of these dimensions, did President Trump act with rashness, courage or cowardice? We cannot say it was cowardly, because he publicly took responsibility for killing a high-ranking Iranian general. No coward would place himself in the crosshairs of a violent terrorist regime. The question is whether or not President Trump acted rashly (i.e., the vice of having too much confidence).

Is Trump over-confident? In terms of acceptable risk, a leader should not create a situation in which he is likely to be killed. Leaders are not invincible, immortal, supermen. Therefore it is not, in principle, wise to wage war with poison weapons, or to target enemy leaders, unless you are prepared to suffer the same fate as those you have targeted.

In principle, a policy of killing enemy leaders, which (I am sad to admit) the United States has followed intermittently since Pearl Harbor, exposes our own leaders to assassination. An example of how this works may be found in the case of President John Kennedy’s assassination. It is known that Kennedy ordered a hit on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. It is also known that Castro learned of Kennedy’s order through a double agent (i.e., the prospective assassin), and said he knew about Kennedy’s hit when he visited the Brazilian Embassy in September 1963. These facts have been alluded to by famous persons, including President Lyndon Johnson and the chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, James Angleton. It is believed by some intelligence experts that two communist bloc intelligence services (DGI and KGB) were complicit in Kennedy’s assassination; that the Soviets acted to defend Castro, preemptively, and to lay down the law to future American presidents. This action had the intended effect when President Gerald Ford instituted Executive Order 12333, prohibiting assassinations. Because President Ford understood why Kennedy was assassinated, he exercised prudence to safeguard the person of the president — reflecting the lesson of Dallas, learned on 22 November 1963. The lesson was simple: America should not attempt to assassinate foreign leaders or officials. President Carter and President Reagan affirmed Executive Order 12333 during their terms of office.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

American Bases In Kurdistan: “Out Of The Box,” Take 2… by Gerald A. Honigman

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

Ankara has rendered the important American base at Incirlik all but useless.

Shi’a Arabs–who owe their ascendancy to America’s defeat of their various Sunni Arab tormentors–have told us our days are numbered in Iraq. The American-equipped Iraqi Shi’a army had earlier fled ISIS, leaving it many modern American weapons, and the Kurds were then mostly the only ones left resisting the Jihadis–only to be abandoned later by Washington afterwards…Shame!

So, what is America now to do?

For reasons of justice, practicality, and necessity, the time for American bases in Iraqi Kurdistan and an open embrace of Kurdish friends and allies has arrived….

We have supplied Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Pakistanis, Afghanis, and others with trillions of dollars in military and other aid and support since at least World War II–many who openly hate America. So doing likewise for a people who mostly like America should be a no-brainer.

For decades, most of the world has proclaimed the need for a second state for Arabs in the original post-World War I,1920 Mandate of Palestine. Since 1922, Jordan sits on almost 80% of that land. Arabs have nearly two dozen states today–most created by conquest and forced Arabization of other non-Arab peoples’ territories.

Around the same time that most of Palestine was gifted to Arab nationalism in one of its numerous subspecies, Kurds were promised independence in the northern part of the much larger Mandate of Mesopotamia. A collusion of British petroleum politics and Arab nationalism aborted those dreams…a solely Arab-dominated Iraq arose instead. Search “British Petroleum Politics, Arab Nationalism, and the Kurds” to see what you find…

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Trump to Iran: Say Hello to My Little Friends By Rick Moran

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/trending/trump-to-iran-say-hello-to-my-little-friends/

When relations are as bad as they are between the U.S. and Iran, other ways must be found to communicate. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy deployed overwhelming military strength off the coast of Cuba to signal to Khrushchev that the U.S. was ready for war if the Soviets made those missiles operational.

Donald Trump is also using non-verbal communication to talk to Iran. At Hill Air Force Base in Utah, 52 of the most awesome, the most advanced, the most deadly warplanes ever created — the F-35AII Lightning —  lined up and took off in what they refer to as an “elephant walk.”  It was the largest elephant walk in history.

What an awesome sight.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Xi’s China Ends 2019 With The Worst Religious Persecution In The Country’s History By Helen Raleigh

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/07/xis-china-ends-2019-with-the-worst-religious-persecution-in-the-countrys-history/

Increased religious persecution in China has failed to curtail the growing number of Christians, which has reached more than 100 million today — more than the 90 million members of the Chinese Communist Party.

Dec. 30, 2019, was a day when people who live in the free world were busy planning ahead and getting ready for New Year’s Eve celebrations. But for China’s outspoken Wang Yi, the founding pastor of China’s most famous house church, the Early Rain Covenant Church, there was no such celebration. After being detained by Chinese authorities for more than a year without an actual charge, in a closed-door legal proceeding Wang was sentenced to nine years in prison for trumped up convictions of “inciting subversion of state power” and “illegal business activities.”

Throughout the proceeding, Wang’s lawyer wasn’t allowed to defend him. In addition to jail time, Wang will be stripped of his political rights for four years, and the Chinese government will confiscate about $7,000 worth of his personal assets. According to Bob Fu, president of China Aid, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization advocating for basic rights of Chinese Christians, Wang’s sentence is the harshest of any house church leaders in China.

Why Pastor Wang Engaged in ‘Faithful Disobedience’

I had first written about the injustice Wang and his church faced in early December 2019, which marked the one-year anniversary of his detainment. Wang and more than 100 of his church members were arrested during a raid just before Christmas, which the government initiated to “root out” a number of prominent Christians and house churches back in 2018.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Sense of foreboding darkens Democratic primary Many early-state Democrats are gripped by dread over recent headlines. The candidates are making it worse. By David Siders

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/07/democratic-primary-2020-095090

DAVENPORT, Iowa — The new year is taking the presidential primary to a dark place in the nation’s first caucus state.

President Donald Trump’s impending impeachment trial and fear of war with Iran — as well as the Australia wildfires and their implications for climate change — quickly cast a pall over a contest in which Democrats are already wracked with uncertainty about which candidate has the best chance of defeating Trump.

All across Iowa hangs an air of heightened distress, which the candidates are readily leaning into.

“I tell you all these things not to get you nervous, but to get you depressed,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, speaking about climate change, said at a town hall meeting in Grundy Center, Iowa, over the weekend.

Hours later in Des Moines, it was Joe Biden describing the state of Trump’s presidency more broadly as “extremely, extremely worrisome.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren admonished supporters in Davenport that “this is a time of crisis in this country.”

Democrats have fretted for more than a year about how to choose a nominee. And for those who loathe Trump, the imperative to remove him from office has remained high since the minute he won election in 2016.