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Palestinians: Arresting, Torturing Journalists by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on March 7th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13842/palestinians-arrest-torture-journalists

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, a body dominated by Fatah loyalists, condemned the arrest of Hazem Nasser and called for his immediate release. The syndicate pointed out that Nasser had been summoned for interrogation by the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces several times in the past few weeks despite the fact that he did not commit any crime.

In the world of the PA and Hamas, the only “good” journalists are those who report negatively about Israel. Independent journalists therefore find themselves forced to seek work in non-Palestinian media organizations, including some in Israel. Even then, these journalists, especially those who live under the PA and Hamas, engage in massive self-censorship.

What is hard to understand are the continued closed mouths of the international community and media towards this ongoing assault on the freedom of the media in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Had Nasser and Abu Arafeh been arrested by the Israeli authorities, their “plight” would have been splashed over headlines across the globe.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank is continuing its unremitting security crackdown on Palestinian journalists, particularly on those who are not affiliated with Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction. Scores of journalists have been arrested or summoned by the PA in the West Bank on a regular basis in the past few years. In the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Palestinian journalists are facing a similar campaign of intimidation and harassment.

In the past few days, another two journalists, Hazem Nasser and Amer Abu Arafeh, were arrested by the PA security forces — and not for the first time. Nasser, who is from the city of Tulkarem, and Abu Arafeh, who is from Hebron, have, in fact, become “frequent visitors” of PA detention centers and interrogation rooms.

The incarceration of Nasser and Abu Arafeh brings to 16 the number of Palestinian journalists who have been arrested or summoned for interrogation by the PA security forces in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip just since the beginning of this year.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Continued Resilience of Quiet America By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 7th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/06/the-

Fifty years ago, the United States was facing crises and unrest on multiple fronts. Some predicted that internal chaos and revolution would unravel the nation.

The 1969 Vietnam War protests on the UC Berkeley campus turned so violent that National Guard helicopters indiscriminately sprayed tear gas on student demonstrators. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of major cities as part of the “Moratorium to the End the War in Vietnam.” In Washington, D.C., about a half-million protesters marched to the White House.

Native American demonstrators took over the former federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and stayed there for 19 months, declaring it their own sovereign space.

In November 1969, the American public was exposed to grotesque photos of the My Lai Massacre, which had occurred the year before. The nation was stunned that American troops in Vietnam had shot innocent women and children. My Lai heated up the already hot national debate over whether the Vietnam War was either moral or winnable.

Meanwhile, the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven, involving the supposed organizers of the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, roiled the nation. The courtroom drama involving radical defendants such as Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin descended into a national circus, as the battle between leftists and the establishment went from the streets to the courtroom.

It was also the year of the Woodstock music festival. More than 400,000 thrill-seekers showed up on a small farm in the Catskill Mountains in August 1969 to celebrate three days of “peace and music.” Footage of free love and free drugs at Woodstock shocked half the country but resonated with the other half, which viewed the festival as much-needed liberation for an uptight nation.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Must We Really Take Care Not To Offend Extremists?By Douglas Murray

Posted By on March 7th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/06/must

Britain, in recent days, has had a rare distraction from its seemingly endless Brexit debate. The distraction, however, has not been an altogether welcome one. It involves the case of Shamima Begum, one of a number of girls who left their school in Bethnal Green in London in 2015 to go and join ISIS.

Back then, in 2015, the story of the Bethnal Green schoolgirls was headline news. Many British people were genuinely shocked that anyone—let alone young women at the start of their lives—would find ISIS’s promise of a Caliphate so alluring that they would leave the comforts of their friends, family, and country in the UK to go to join the group. There was much national debate about this. Various people, including some of the girls’ family members, blamed the British police and security services for not stopping the girls from leaving the UK. Ironically, the people who blamed the police—including the lawyer representing the girls’ families—were often precisely the same people as those who had spent previous years urging Muslims in Britain not to cooperate with the British police. How exactly the British police were either to blame, or to find any way to “win” in such a situation, was never explained. It was just one of many paradoxes thrown up in these circumstances.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Speaker Ocasio-Cortez House leaders seem to be afraid of their radical backbenchers.

Posted By on March 7th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/speaker-ocasio-cortez-11551917962

This week’s amazing House revolt involves a leadership attempt to discipline Ms. Omar for her latest “vile, anti-Semitic slur,” as Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel described the comments she made at a public forum last week. Referring to the U.S.-Israel relationship, Ms. Omar said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

After New York Democrat Nita Lowey also criticized her remark, Ms. Omar doubled down, writing “I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee.” Accusing American Jews of putting allegiance to the Jewish state above loyalty to America is an anti-Semitic classic.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Andrew C. McCarthy: Would Mueller indict Trump for ‘attempting’ to fire Mueller?

Posted By on March 7th, 2019

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-c-mccarthy-would-mueller-indict-trump-for-attempting-to-fire-mueller

With indications that special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report is imminent, talk of “no collusion” is dominating chatter by the president, his fans, and his critics. That is, a finding of no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia is widely anticipated. Yet, my sense is that, more than on collusion, Mueller may focus on the obstruction aspect of his investigation.

I want to examine an element of that, involving the status of Mueller himself.

New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt have highlighted Trump’s purported “attempts” to fire Mueller, which mainly involved “trying to get” then-White House counsel Donald McGahn to fire him. What does this reporting tell us? Well, we know prosecutors are investigating whether the president obstructed the Russia investigation. How could bombast about firing Mueller bear on that issue when, of course, Trump never actually fired him?

The answer may be found in that word: attempt.

The Times reporting presages that Mueller has homed in on the parts of federal obstruction laws that address not only interference with a proceeding but also “attempts” to do so. Could the special counsel be poised to argue that Trump committed obstruction by attempting to fire the special counsel?

If that is the theory, it is meritless. In the context of the chief executive’s dismissal of subordinates, the concept of attempt is inapposite. A president either fires someone or he doesn’t.

Actually, there are at least three problems with trying to inflate Trump’s spasms of anger over Mueller into an obstruction felony.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

White privilege lecture tells students white people ‘dangerous’ if they don’t see race Diana Soriano

Posted By on March 6th, 2019

https://www.thecollegefix.com/white-

During a guest lecture at Boston University on Monday, University of Washington Professor Robin DiAngelo told the audience a “dangerous white person” sees people as individuals rather than by skin color.

DiAngelo, whose main field of work is “whiteness studies,” added that those who say they were taught to treat everyone the same deny black people of their reality, she said.

In making the claim, DiAngelo said she was lifting the terminology from her frequent co-facilitator at speaking engagements, black scholar Erin Trent Johnson.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard law students disinvite eminent legal scholar because his views on ‘genocide’ are wrong Greg Piper

Posted By on March 6th, 2019

https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-

In order to speak at the Harvard Law School Forum, you must pass a political litmus test.

That’s what constitutional law scholar Bruce Fein learned after the nonpartisan student organization invited him and then quickly disinvited him when he gave the wrong answer on a polarizing legal question.

“[T]he censorship craze infecting higher education has spread from the area of gender combat into the more esoteric arena of international politics and historical interpretation,” according to Harvey Silverglate, former Harvard Law lecturer and co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The civil-liberties lawyer writes for Boston’s WGBH that the Forum’s move is particularly concerning because it’s the “premier free speech organization” at Harvard Law, and Fein was planning to lecture on “the beleaguered rule of law in the age of Trump.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Nielsen: ‘Illegal Immigration Is Simply Spiraling Out of Control’ By Jack Crowe

Posted By on March 6th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kirstjen-nielsen-illegal-immigration-is-simply-spiraling-out-of-control/

Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen on Wednesday warned lawmakers that the recent surge in illegal immigration at the southern border could overwhelm U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents if they are not provided additional resources.

“In February, we saw a 30 percent jump over the previous month, with agents apprehending or encountering nearly 75,000 aliens,” Nielsen told the House Committee on Homeland Security. “This is an 80 percent increase over the same time last year. And I can report today that CBP is forecasting the problem will get even worse this spring as the weather warms up.”

“We want to strengthen legal immigration and welcome more individuals through a merit-based system that enhances our economic vitality and the vibrancy of our diverse nation. We also will continue to uphold our humanitarian ideals,” she said. “But illegal immigration is simply spiraling out of control and threatening public safety and national security.”

Nielsen’s testimony came just hours after the Trump administration released a report that details a significant rise in the number of illegal immigrants being apprehended at the southern border. Since the beginning of the fiscal year, CPB has apprehended 268,000 such immigrants at the border, an average of nearly 2,000 per day and the highest rate since 2007.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Tlaib to File Impeachment Articles against Trump By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on March 6th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tlaib-to-file-impeachment-articles-against-trump/

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) has announced that she plans to file articles of impeachment against President Trump.

“Later on this month, I will be joining folks and advocates across the country to file the impeachment resolution to start the impeachment proceedings,” Tlaib said at a press conference Wednedsay. “I think every single colleague of mine agrees there’s impeachable offenses. That’s one thing that we all agree on. We may disagree on the pace.”

The freshman Democrat, who has called Trump a “direct and serious threat to our country,” accused the president of “violations of the United States Constitution” and obstruction of justice in announcing her decision.

“We saw record turnout in an election year, where people wanted to elect a jury that would begin the impeachment proceedings to Donald Trump,” she said.

Tlaib made waves in January when she promised the day she was sworn in that the new Democratic House majority would “impeach the motherfu**er.” She defended herself in the days that followed, saying the president “needs to put a mirror up” and that he “has met his match,” but later apologized for causing a “distraction.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Deep State Past and Present By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 6th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/deep-state-nothing-new-american-politics/

The so-called deep state is often weaponized to reflect current orthodoxies.

All great empires of the past created deep states.

The permanent bureaucracies and elite hangers-on adapted as imperial conditions dictated. Imperial Spain’s El Escorial outside Madrid, the courts of Renaissance Venice, and Byzantium’s Constantinople, or the thousands who lived at 18th-century Versailles, were all thronged with court functionaries. They were the embryos of nonstop dramas of intrigue and coups, and often immune to periodic changes even in autocratic heads of state.

The Byzantine emperor Justinian savagely curbed the influence of his bureaucratic opponents only through the infamous slaughter of the Nika riots of AD 532. The key for the deep-state careerist was always survival, even more than public service. The ubiquitous fifth-century B.C. Athenian Alcibiades was variously an Athenian democratic imperialist, a suspected oligarchic sympathizer, a wanted outlaw of the Athenian state, a turncoat working for Sparta, a returning Athenian democrat, and an aristocratic exile under the protection of Persia — the common denominator being a manipulative skilled survivor of the politics of the Greek city-state.

Similar was the much later example of the “versatile” French minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. Talleyrand for more than 40 years was a fixture of the permanent Paris court and thus in succession an advocate and betrayer of the Ancien Régime, the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the restored monarchy. His loyalty was to the career of Monsieur Talleyrand rather than to France, much less to monarchy, the revolution, republican government, or dictatorship.