ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Bars Omar And Tlaib The Jewish State shows how it’s done. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on August 16th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274645/israel-bars-omar-and-tlaib-ari-lieberman

Lawmakers Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) will not be traveling to Israel. The excursion, slated for Friday, was nixed by Israel’s interior ministry headed by Aryeh Deri. Decisions to grant or deny visas to Israel are the domain of the Ministry of Interior but given the high-profile nature of the visit, it is a virtual certainty that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was consulted and had the final say.

The decision to bar entry for the duo – known for their frequent anti-Semitic outbursts – was not without controversy but demonstrated significant political fortitude. In 2017, Israel passed a law permitting the interior ministry to deny entry to those advocating for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Omar and Tlaib are among the most notorious advocates of this malign ideology. In fact, both sponsored a congressional bill in support of BDS and obscenely compared boycotts of Israel with boycotts of Nazi Germany.

Following the asinine comparison, the United States State Department updated its definition of antisemitism to include as an example, “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” The malign positions held by both Omar and Tlaib place the two squarely within the State Department’s definition of antisemitism.

Last month, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, indicated that the Omar-Tlaib visit would be allowed to proceed unhindered “out of respect for the US Congress and the great alliance between Israel and America.” But circumstances changed measurably once Israel became aware of their malevolent itinerary.

The itinerary was titled, “U.S Congressional Delegation to Palestine.” The United States does not recognize a legal entity known as “Palestine.” Moreover, there was ominously no mention of Israel. The itinerary highlighted plans to meet with various heads of Arab governmental and non-governmental organizations with long records of hostility toward the Jewish State. No meetings were planned with any members of mainstream Israeli political parties. Finally, their trip was planned by MIFTAH, a Palestinian NGO headed Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian Authority lawmaker and PLO central committee member.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Bibi does what Dems don’t have the courage to do By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Posted By on August 16th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/bibi_does_what_dems_dont_have_the_courage_to_do.html

It was great to see it on the news:   

Israeli officials have decided to block U.S. Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from entering the country as part of a planned visit, a reversal that comes amid pressure from President Trump and concerns about their support for boycotts of Israel.

The country’s deputy foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely announced the decision Thursday, despite prior assurances that the congresswomen would be allowed in.  

“Israel has decided — we won’t enable the members of Congress to enter the country,” Hotovely told public broadcaster Kan. “We won’t allow those who deny our right to exist in this world to enter Israel. In principle, this is a very justified decision.” 

Wow, Israel just made my day!

I’ve already heard some in the news say that Israel is banning two Muslim congresswomen.  In other words, they are trying to bring religion into the debate.

Israel’s decision has nothing to do with the ladies’ religion.  It has everything to do with their positions and barbaric comments against Israel.

For example, the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Also, referring to Israel as “Nazi Germany,” an insult of the worst kind to a people who have direct connections to the Holocaust.

Thank you Israel.  Thank you for doing what today’s Democrats won’t do.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Singling Out Israel By Janet Levy

Posted By on August 16th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/singling_out_israel.html

The European Union has just announced a proposal that all Israeli products made in contested areas — Samaria, Judea, and other Israeli settlements — would be required to carry consumer warning labels specifying their origin.  This action comes only a few months after Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry uncovered evidence that the E.U. was funding more than a dozen NGOs, including some linked to militant groups that promote the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.

The E.U.’s “official” position is that it does not support or fund BDS.  Yet its failure to act on NGO funding, coupled now with the labeling proposal, reveals the E.U.’s failure to follow its own policy and to actively undermine Israel.  The idea that international law requires economic action against Israel falls flat when the E.U. failed to sanction countries that engaged in human rights violations in occupied territories.

Consider the E.U.’s lack of response to Chinese appropriation of Tibet, to Iranian subjugation and ethnic genocide in Syria, and to the Turkish invasion and more than 40 years of occupation in northern Cyprus.  Given E.U. inaction in these instances, it is glaringly obvious that Israel writer Natan Sharansky’s 3-D definition of anti-Semitism aptly applies.  That is, Israel is unfairly singled out using demonization, delegitimization, and a double standard of judging its actions.

Further, E.U. countries continue to do business with China, Iran, and Turkey despite blatant, glaring human rights violations and occupations in Tibet, Syria, and Northern Cyprus.  A brief review of those actions makes plain the E.U. bias against Israel.

HISTORY Comments turned off

A Bad Deal, 80 Years Ago By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 16th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/a-bad-deal-80-years-ago/

Some 80 years ago, on Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the “Treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted on the huge resources of Communist Russia, and its hostility to the Nazis, to serve as a brake on Adolf Hitler’s Western ambitions. Great Britain and the other Western European democracies had assumed that the Nazis would never invade them as long as a hostile Soviet Union threatened the German rear.

The incompatibility between communism and Nazism was considered by all to be existential — and permanent. That mutual hatred explained why dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin both despised and feared each other.

Yet all at once, such illusions vanished with the signing of the pact. Just seven days later, on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.

After quickly absorbing most of Eastern Europe by either coercion or alliance, Hitler was convinced that he now had a safe rear. So he turned west in spring 1940 to overrun Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and the Netherlands.

Hitler accomplished all that relatively easily, failing only to conquer Great Britain with an exhaustive bombing campaigning.

During all these Nazi conquests, a compliant Stalin shipped huge supplies of food and fuel for the German war effort against the West. Stalin cynically had hoped that Germany and the Western democracies would wear themselves out in a wasting war — similar to the four horrific years in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time — Part XXIV Francis Menton

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-8-14-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxiv

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the fraud committed by the keepers of official world temperature records, by which they intentionally adjust early year temperature records downward in order to support assertions that dangerous human-caused global warming is occurring and that the most recent year or month is the “hottest ever.” The assertions of dangerous human-caused global warming then form the necessary predicate for tens of billions of dollars of annual spending going to academic institutions; to the “climate science” industry; to wind, solar and other alternative energy projects; to electric cars; and on and on. In terms of real resources diverted from productive to unproductive activities based on falsehoods, this fraud dwarfs any other scientific fraud ever conceived in human history.

This is Part XXIV of my series on this topic. To read Parts I through XXIII, go to this link.

The previous posts in this series have mostly focused on particular weather stations, comparing the currently-reported temperature history for each station with previously-reported data. For example, the very first post in this series, from July 2013, looked at one of my favorite stations, the one located in Central Park in New York City. Somehow, the early-year temperatures reported for the month of July for that very prominent station had been substantially adjusted downward, thus notably enhancing a previously-slight warming trend:

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Mysterious, Outrageous Death of Jeffrey Epstein It’s next to impossible to kill oneself in jail—I know, because I’ve been there. Judith Miller ****

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/jeffrey-epstein

Here are a few things I know firsthand about being in jail. First and foremost, you have virtually no control over your life and surroundings. You can’t get so much as an aspirin without authorization. In most jails, you can’t wear a belt, or shoelaces, or keep a razor in your cell. You have no privacy, no sense of dignity, and no rights. And in a well-run jail, high-profile prisoners have virtually no chance of killing themselves.

So the alleged suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, the 66-year-old financier with powerful American and foreign friends who was about to stand trial for allegedly sexually abusing dozens of girls, many of them underage, is particularly unfathomable—and outrageous. In a letter to the Justice Department, Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska called it inexcusable that Epstein did not live to face his accusers. “Obviously, heads must roll,” he wrote. Attorney General William Barr clearly agrees. Saying that he was “appalled” to have learned that Epstein was found dead at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday morning at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in lower Manhattan, Barr instructed the department’s inspector general to investigate precisely how Epstein died at MCC, a long-troubled, pretrial detention facility.

Epstein was placed on suicide watch on July 23 after being found semi-conscious in his cell with marks on his neck, in what prison officials described at the time as a failed suicide attempt. He was removed from suicide watch six days later, on July 29, and returned to a segregated area of the prison with extra security known as the special housing unit. Why Epstein was removed from suicide watch is a focus of the DOJ investigation.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Truth Behind the Trump Storm Low-skilled immigration has changed dramatically since America’s Ellis Island days. Kay S. Hymowitz January 16, 2018

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

.https://www.city-journal.org/html/truth-behind-trump-storm-15676.html

…..”The truth is that an “hourglass,” low-mobility, big-government economy presents a new set of questions about immigration policy. Today’s immigrants face a different economic reality from their predecessors. 

During the mass migration that took place in the period between 1850 and 1930, more than 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Many were uneducated and unskilled people from countries that were largely shitholes. Immigrants from nineteenth-century Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Austro-Hungarian, Greece, even the now-flush Scandinavian countries, were escaping poor, stagnant places where the future promised more of the same.

Poverty and lack of skills didn’t stop newcomers from finding work because there was plenty of it—on the piers of New York and Philadelphia, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest, and in the factories that were spreading to cities all over the country. In 1914, over 70 percent of the factory workers at Ford Motor Company were foreign-born. Immigrants and their children were over half of all of American manufacturing workers in 1920. New technologies and a swelling population also meant more jobs for construction and transportation workers. The pre–World War II industrial economy, sociologists Roger Waldinger and Joel Perlman have written, offered a “range of blue collar opportunities” for immigrants and their children.

Today’s unskilled immigrants are not so lucky. Automation and offshoring to Third World countries have seriously eroded the number of blue-collar jobs. Manufacturing positions plummeted from 19.4 million in 1979 to 11.5 million in 2010, even as immigrants were adding millions to the population of job seekers. In 1970, blue-collar jobs were 31.2 percent of total nonfarm employment. By 2016, their share had fallen to 13.6 percent of total employment. Today’s immigrants are more likely to be hotel workers, agricultural hands, bussers, janitors, and hospital orderlies. They may be earning more than they could have in their home countries, but their wages—assuming they work full-time—are enough only to keep them a notch or two above the poverty line in the United States. Adding to their troubles is frequently a lack of benefits, unreliable hours, and little chance for moving up the income ladder.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Radical Politics on the Public Dime New York community organizations siphon off taxpayer money to promote their agendas. Seth Barron

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/radical-politics-ny-community-organizations

In September 2018, activist groups around New York rushed to denounce the Trump administration for considering making changes to the “public charge” rule for noncitizens. The changes would add food stamps, Medicaid, and federal housing vouchers to the programs that count against immigrants when the government determines their future status. The New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) staged a protest outside the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, joined by the African Services Committee and the Chinese-American Planning Council. Executives of the three organizations were arrested after they sat down in the middle of Delancey Street and blocked rush-hour traffic.

New York City has long been fertile ground for political protest, of course, so these events were not unusual—though the city’s protest culture has gone into overdrive since Trump’s election, with rallies, marches, and demonstrations becoming a frequent backdrop around Manhattan. Civil-society groups, along with elected officials, activists, and unions, typically organize these protests, which run the gamut from standard political rallies to civil disobedience. What most New Yorkers don’t realize, though, is that many of the protests, including NYIC’s action last year, aren’t simply the work of civic-minded private citizens. On the contrary: they are funded, sometimes lavishly, by local and state government—that is, by taxpayers. New York is home to a host of such groups, which, in the Trump era, have expanded their charitable missions to include near-constant political activism. Whether they agree or disagree with these efforts, New Yorkers should understand that they’re paying the bill for them.

New York City spends about $95 billion annually. Not counting Medicaid spending, the city allocates about 13 percent of its outlays to human services—including homeless shelters, senior centers, youth recreation, adult literacy, foster care, and many other programs tailored to the needs of New York’s 8.5 million people, 43 percent of whom live below the city-measured poverty line. The city contracts with nonprofit organizations to provide many of these services. Most homeless shelters, for instance, are run by nongovernmental organizations. Similarly, nonprofits provide public defenders to indigent defendants. Individual contracts with these large groups—such as the Lutheran Social Services of Metropolitan New York, Inc., which deals with vulnerable children—can run to hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Acting DHS Secretary: Border Crossings Down 43 Percent Since May By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/acting-dhs-secretary-border-crossings-down-43-percent-since-may/

Acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan said Wednesday that border crossings have declined 43 percent since May, when arrests between ports of entry at the southern border increased for the fourth straight month to 132,887, up from 99,304 arrests in April.

“So those efforts are making progress, 43 percent reduction in crossings since May,” McAleenan said. “We’re hoping to continue the progress in August.”

McAleenan said DHS is working with Central American countries to protect migrants who need asylum as well as conduct an “aggressive effort against human smugglers,” a project he said “could really change the game.”

“I’ll be going back to Central America next week to try to build on that with El Salvador and Panama and really address this problem as a regional effort,” he said.

The number of immigrants being held at border stations is also down significantly from its June high of 20,000, McAleenan said. “This morning we have less than 4,000, and they’re not staying with us very long. We’re able to repatriate the single adults quickly. The unaccompanied children are going to a better situation with Health and Human Services.”

The acting DHS chief went on to take a shot at what he sees as a toxic political environment “where we’re demonizing law enforcement for doing their jobs,” calling it “concerning.”

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Andrew Bostom:Rev. Justin Perkins, American linguist & missionary, 1836 eyewitness to a murderous Persian Muslim blood libel against, & seething Islamic hatred, of Jews.

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

Rev. Justin Perkins. A Residence of Eight Years in Persia among the Nestorian Christians with Notices of the Muhammedans, New York, 1843; p. 276.

May 20, 1836] Yesterday an unoffending Jew was publicly beheaded and burned in this city. The enraged Mohammedans had, for two or three days, thronged the governor’s palace by thousands, demanding that the whole Jewish population of the city should be put to death to a man. And to appease the mob, the governor delivered up this individual. He was arraigned under the accusation of having murdered a Mohammedan child. The Mohammedans…cherish the belief, (or profess to cherish it,) that the Jews possess an instinctive thirst for human blood, as well as seek human victims for an annual sacrifice.

In this instance, a Mohammedan infant was found dead, before the door of a Jew.

The probability is that the child died a natural death and was thus exposed by interested persons, to rouse public indignation against the poor Jews; and so strong is the hatred of the Mohammedans towards the descendants of Israel, that the stratagem proved entirely successful, as is often the case in Mohammedan countries…The hostility cherished by Mohammedans towards the Jews is inconceivably more bitter than their hatred to Christians. The determined aversion which the Jews early manifested to the religion of the impostor [Muhammad] is still remembered and strongly resented by his followers.