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Norway’s Top Cop Seems Baffled by Free Speech – but Not by the Inviolability of the Koran by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on December 4th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15240/norway-free-speech-koran

Norwegian police chief Marie Benedicte Bjørnland is unable to rid from her mind the certainty that mistreating a copy of the Koran is wrong and that she and her fellow flatfoots should, under some statute or other, have the power to do something about it. In short, for the Norwegian police, the Koran is, in a way, as holy as it is for Muslims.

Once again, one was reminded of the cartoon crisis, when the Norwegian diplomatic corps saw it as urgent to apologize to authoritarian governments for whatever is left in Norway of individual liberty.

A teacher at the school explained that she had “made a conscious decision not to buy napkins with ‘Merry Christmas’ written on them” or to use a red tablecloth or red tree ornaments because “certain religions are very sensitive” and care needs to be taken “not to offend anyone.”

The Norwegian government has recently spent well over $100,000 to convert churches in Stavanger and Skien into mosques and is kicking in a huge sum of taxpayer money for the construction of a mega-mosque in Bergen with, according to journalist and political activist Hege Storhaug, “open ties to extremism.”

Recently I wrote here about how, on November 16, the group Stop Islamization of Norway (Stopp Islamisering av Norge – SIAN) set fire to a copy of the Koran in a public square in Kristiansand, only to have the fire doused pronto by a group of 30 or more police officers. It later emerged that they were under secret orders from the chief of the Norwegian police, Marie Benedicte Bjørnland, not just to put out any such fire but to prevent SIAN members from committing any such act.

Bjørnland defended her orders by citing the so-called “racism clause” of Norway’s criminal law, and the Minister of Justice, Jøran Kallmyr, stood behind her, making the baffling statement that while burning a Koran was not illegal, it could (depending on how you translated his words) “become” or “morph into” a crime.

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Morning Greatness: Nadler Hypes He Won’t Take Any Sh!t During Today’s Judiciary Pageant Liz Sheld

Posted By on December 4th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/04/morning-greatness-nadler-hypes-he-wont-take-any-sht-during-todays-judiciary-pageant/
Good Wednesday morning.

Here is what’s on the president’s agenda today:

The president participates in an Official Welcome with the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
President Trump participates in a North Atlantic Treaty Organization Plenary Session
The president participates in a bilateral meeting with the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany
President Trump participates in a working lunch with the NATO 2%ers
The president participates in a bilateral pull-aside with the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Denmark
President Trump participates in a bilateral pull-aside with the Prime Minister of the Italian Republic
The president participates in a press conference

ImpeachmentTV: Season 2, episode 1- The House Judiciary Caper

Previously, on ImpeachmentTV, the Intelligence Committee Democrats held a parade of hearsay witnesses, followed by the media dutifully reporting “BOMBSHELLS.” The Intelligence Committee partisans produced a report comprised of the witnesses’ fairy tales and voted to adopt the impeachment report and send it to the Judiciary Committee.

One of the most notable parts of this report is that the Democrats obtained some phone records. The records “detailed previously unreported contacts between President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, the White House, top House Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, and Hill columnist John Solomon.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Biden Attempts a Meet-and-Greet, Farmer Reportedly Has No Clue Who He Is

Posted By on December 4th, 2019

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-attempts-meet-greet-farmer

Oh, to be that farmer in the Corn Stalk Cafe.

If you don’t know who I’m talking about, well, Joe Biden probably wishes he doesn’t. And it’s just as well, because the farmer apparently doesn’t know who Joe Biden is, either.

In case the name of the establishment didn’t clue you in, Biden is on another sweep through Iowa, a state where he currently sits in fourth place and is trending downward, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.

In fact, the only reason he can’t really get lower is that Amy Klobuchar is in fifth place and, let’s face facts — Amy-mentum just isn’t happening.

Campaigning in Iowa means plenty of low-level meet-and-greets, and one of them was at the Corn Stalk Cafe in Shelby, according to TheBlaze.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

THE IMPEACHMENT REPORT IS DAMNING….FOR DEMOCRATS

Posted By on December 4th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/12/04/the-impeachment-report-is-damning-all-right-for-democrats/

Amid falling support for impeachment and worries that it will backfire against Democrats, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff released a 300-page report he says proves that President Donald Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors worthy of removing him from office.

And if you read only the summary, you might think they’ve got the goods.

The House impeachment report claims to have “uncovered a months-long effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election.” (You can read the report here.)

It says that the “scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign.”

And it argues that “To compel the Ukrainian president to do his political bidding, President Trump conditioned two official acts on the public announcement of the investigations: a coveted White House visit and critical U.S. military assistance Ukraine needed to fight its Russian adversary.”

So the Democrats’ entire impeachment case rests on two pillars. First, that Trump threatened national security by withholding an aid package to Ukraine. And, second, that he did so in order to get Ukraine’s new president to publicly announce investigations into two supposedly bogus scandals – Joe Biden’s son, and Ukraine’s efforts to keep Trump out of the White House – simply to wound Biden politically.

But read into the report, and then look through the Republican response, and you come to realize that the Democrats fail to support either claim. In fact, in some ways, they make Trump’s case for him.

The report never actually accuses Trump of engaging in bribery.

Despite all the foreboding tones and dark insinuation, the impeachment report never actually accuses Trump of bribery. In fact, the word “bribery” appears only four times in the entire 300-page document: once when it quotes the impeachment clause of the Constitution, twice in reference to accusations of bribery against Biden, and once in defending the impeachment inquiry itself.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

UMass Chancellor Applauded Over BDS Criticism, University President Urged to Act

Posted By on December 4th, 2019

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/12/03/umass-chancellor-applauded-over-bds-criticism-university-president-urged-to-act/

The president of the University of Massachusetts system is being urged to condemn academic boycotts of Israeli universities, after the chancellor of the Amherst campus faced criticism for acknowledging that such boycotts damage academic freedom.

In a letter sent to President Martin Meehan last month, the heads of the Academic Engagement Network and the AMCHA Initiative — both of which oppose the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign in academia — applauded Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy of UMass Amherst for an October 21 statement condemning a “one-dimensional” and “polarizing” BDS panel that was set to take place on campus on November 12.

The event, which came on the heels of another major pro-BDS panel on the Amherst campus in May, exclusively featured supporters of the BDS campaign, which has been criticized by Jewish groups worldwide for denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and advancing antisemitic tropes. Among the participants was BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti, who has rejected the notion that Jewish people have a right to self-determination by claiming that they are not a nation, as well as activist Linda Sarsour, who has spoken at a rally hosted by antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and recently claimed that Israel “is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else.”

The lack of ideological diversity on the panel, Subbaswamy noted at the time, would do “little to increase the understanding of such a complex topic like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

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Rewriting the History of Israel’s 1948 War by Moshe Phillips

Posted By on December 4th, 2019

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/12/03/rewriting-the-history-of-israels-1948-war/

Arthur Szyk (1894-1951) was a great artist. But that doesn’t mean that every world leader he painted deserves our admiration — nor should we assume that Syzk admired every one of them, either.

In a recent essay in The Algemeiner, Samantha Lyons and Irvin Ungar presented Syzk’s 1941 portrait of King Abdullah I of Transjordan. Lyons and Ungar hailed Abdullah as an “Arab peacemaker.” But Abdullah was nothing of the sort.

Lyons and Ungar also claimed that Syzk’s portrait “reveals his admiration for a moderate Middle Eastern leader.” But they present no convincing evidence that Syzk felt that way. The fact that the painting was a “dignified rendering” of Abdullah says nothing about what Szyk thought of him.

Let’s remember that Szyk was an active member of the Bergson Group, which was created and led by activists from the Jabotinsky movement. They regarded Transjordan as a part of historic Eretz Yisrael, which had been illegally and immorally torn from the rest of Mandatory Palestine by the British authorities in 1922.

As the unelected leader of Transjordan, Abdullah was the fascist dictator of a country that was little more than a work of fiction. There were no “Transjordanians.” Their “nation” was concocted by the British in order to give Abdullah a “country” to rule over, after they disappointed him by giving the throne of Iraq to his brother. So they severed the eastern 78 percent of the Palestine Mandate and handed it to him on a silver platter as a consolation prize.

It hardly seems likely that Syzk “admired” the illegal Arab occupier of 78 percent of Israel.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Journalists Against Free Speech A strange new world. John Tierney

Posted By on December 4th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/journalists-against-free-speech-john-tierney/

Reprinted from City Journal.

Suppose you’re the editorial-page editor of a college newspaper, contemplating the big news on campus: protesters have silenced an invited speaker and gone on a violent rampage. Should you, as a journalist whose profession depends on the First Amendment, write an editorial reaffirming the right to free speech?

If that seems like a no-brainer, you’re behind the times. The question stumped the staff of the Middlebury Campus after protesters silenced conservative social thinker Charles Murray and injured the professor who’d invited him. The prospect of taking a stand on the First Amendment was so daunting that the paper dispensed with its usual weekly editorial, devoting the space instead to a range of opinions from others—most of whom defended the protesters. When a larger and more violent mob at the University of California at Berkeley prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus, students at the Daily Californian did write a forceful editorial—but not in favor of his right to speak. Instead, they reviled Yiannopoulos and denounced those who “invited chaos” by offering a platform to “someone who never belonged here.”

Free speech is no longer sacred among young journalists who have absorbed the campus lessons about “hate speech”—defined more and more broadly—and they’re breaking long-standing taboos as they bring “cancel culture” into professional newsrooms. They’re not yet in charge, but many of their editors are reacting like beleaguered college presidents, terrified of seeming insufficiently “woke.” Most professional journalists, young and old, still pay lip service to the First Amendment, and they certainly believe that it protects their work, but they’re increasingly eager for others to be “de-platformed” or “no-platformed,” as today’s censors like to put it—effectively silenced.

These mostly younger progressive journalists lead campaigns to get conservative journalists fired, banned from Twitter, and “de-monetized” on YouTube. They don’t burn books, but they’ve successfully pressured Amazon to stop selling titles that they deem offensive. They encourage advertising boycotts designed to put ideological rivals out of business. They’re loath to report forthrightly on left-wing censorship and violence, even when fellow journalists get attacked. They equate conservatives’ speech with violence and rationalize leftists’ actual violence as . . . speech.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Divisive, Historically Dubious Curriculum Teachers should reject the 1619 Project. Max Eden

Posted By on December 4th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/1619-project

In 1858, Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln debated the nature of America’s soul. Douglas argued that the Founders believed that the claim in the Declaration of Independence—“all men are created equal”—applied only to whites. They were indifferent to the perpetuation of slavery, he said. Lincoln argued that the Founders foresaw an end to slavery, that the words in the Declaration meant what they said, and that no one before Douglas had ever suggested otherwise.

After a bloody civil war and a decades-long civil rights struggle were fought to vindicate Lincoln’s position, the New York Times and the Pulitzer Center are urging teachers, with the 1619 Project and attendant K-12 curriculum, to take Douglas’s side of the argument.

In her lead essay announcing the project, Nikole Hannah-Jones argues, per Douglas, that the “white men who drafted those words [in the Declaration] did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.” Hannah-Jones’s essay has come under withering attack from eminent historians such as Gordon Wood and James McPherson for its historical distortions. But the 1619 Project’s curriculum does more than encourage teachers to ignore key elements of the historical record; it asks students to blot them out.

One recommended “activity to extend student engagement” asks teachers to lead students in transforming historical documents through “erasure poetry,” which, the curriculum explains, “can be a way of reclaiming and reshaping historical documents; they can lay bare the real purpose of the document or transform it into something wholly new. How will you highlight inequity—or envision liberation—through your erasure poem?” Students could, the guide suggests, erase parts of the Declaration in order to make it fit Hannah-Jones’s essay or amend the Thirteenth Amendment to make it harmonize with an essay arguing that “mass incarceration and excessive punishment is the legacy of slavery.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Global warming, global cooling, climate change, climate emergency, climate catastrophe, climate collapse or existential threat? By Jack Hellner

Posted By on December 4th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/global_warming_global_cooling_climate_change_climate_emergency_climate_catastrophe_climate_collapse_or_existential_threat.html

What wets your whistle? It’s another day and another dire warning from the UN. Of course, almost 100% of the media repeats these dire warnings in order to indoctrinate the public, especially the young, with no questions asked as the media pretends they are fact checkers. 

What is always missing from these articles and warnings is factual historical data. There are no statistics to show how little the temperature has changed the last 140 years, only made up numbers about the future. There are no statistics to show how little the sea levels have changed the last 140 years, only threats about the future. There are also no statistics on hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards or drought the last 149 years, only made up numbers about the supposed threat. 

Somehow, these supposedly educated journalists never point out how wrong previous predictions have been, but the solution is always to transfer freedom and trillions of dollars to bureaucrats and politicians throughout the World. 

Today we only have a few years left and the cost has gone up substantially. Is it any wonder that the birth rate is so low when most of the people pushing the climate catastrophe crap also support abortion on demand at any stage of the pregnancy and we are told that humans are destroying the Earth and they are going to die soon anyway so why bring children into the World?

U.N. Chief Warns “Point of No Return” on Climate Change “Is in Sight”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres isn’t mincing words when it comes to issuing a dire warning about the global climate crisis, saying that the effort to stop climate change has been “utterly inadequate.”

No one should want their children to live in this ‘bleak’ future

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mr. Schiff’s Impeachment Opus His overstatements reveal the weakness of the Democratic case.

Posted By on December 4th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mr-schiffs-impeachment-opus-11575418600?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

These columns warned that once the machinery of impeachment was up and running, it would be impossible to stop. And so on Tuesday Adam Schiff released his House Intelligence Committee report on Ukraine that finds President Trump guilty of playing domestic politics with foreign policy. But it’s clear the President’s real sin is being the willful, undisciplined Donald Trump voters elected.

The bulk of Mr. Schiff’s 300-page opus is a prosecutorial account of Mr. Trump’s four-month attempt to persuade new Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations into corruption and Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election. It is not a flattering tale, and it would make a compelling plank in a 2020 campaign indictment of Mr. Trump’s character and poor judgment.

But Mr. Schiff’s report casts himself and his cause as much grander. He is Adam at the bridge of our republic, heroic defender of American democracy. His introduction is worth quoting at length to capture his pretensions to nonpartisan statesmanship.

“The decision to move forward with an impeachment inquiry is not one we took lightly. Under the best of circumstances, impeachment is a wrenching process for the nation. I resisted calls to undertake an impeachment investigation for many months on that basis, notwithstanding the existence of presidential misconduct that I believed to be deeply unethical and damaging to our democracy,” he writes.