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Christchurch, “Jewish Blame,” and the Global Scourge of Muslim Jew-Hatred Andrew Bostom

Posted By on April 11th, 2019

https://www.theepochtimes.com/christchurch-jewish-blame-and-the-global-scourge-of-muslim-jew-hatred_2847735.html

Brenton Tarrant committed a heinous, cowardly act of mass murder when he gunned down 50 defenseless Muslims at two Christchurch, New Zealand, area mosques on March 15, 2019.

As revealed in his own alleged manifesto, Tarrant’s ideological paradigm is a bigoted ethno-nationalist, Marxist-Leninist communist state—i.e., the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—“the nation with the closest political and social values to my [Tarrant’s] own.”

The PRC’s brutal behavior on a grand scale—forcibly interning and “re-educating” an estimated 1.5 million Xinjiang province Uyghur Muslims—comports neatly with Tarrant’s ideologically driven violence.

Tarrant alone bears ultimate responsibility for the carnage he wrought. Moreover, predictably hysterical claims by the Jew-hating Turkish President Erdogan—echoed by supposedly more staid Muslim organizations, “expert” media commentators, and “academics”—that Tarrant somehow represents systemic Western Islamophobia, grotesquely distort the global context of both Muslim versus non-Muslim (especially Christian) and internecine Muslim violence.

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3 Muslim Terror Plots Targeted US Synagogues in 3 Months American Jews have no idea that they might have been killed this year. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273412/3-muslim-terror-plots-targeted-us-synagogues-3-daniel-greenfield

On Wednesday, April 3, FBI agents converged on a Bozeman shooting range and took Fabjan Alameti into custody.

Alemati, an Albanian Muslim, had traveled from New York to Montana. “When the time will come for us to hunt them down, I will stand over them while I piece their bodies with hollow tips,” the Islamic terrorist had boasted in February. “Inshallah, we take as many kuffars (non-Muslims) with us.”

He had told a government informant back in January that his potential targets included military and government targets, as well as a “Jewish temple”.

Alameti’s terror plot back in January was the second such Islamic terror plot that month.

On December 14, 2018, Hasher Jallal Taheb was discussing some of the targets he had scouted in Washington D.C. They included the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, and a specific synagogue.

In the middle of January, Taheb was arrested over in Georgia.

Taheb and Alemati had a number of similarities. Both men were twenty-one years old. Their terror plots were violent but scattershot. The range began with government building and ended with a synagogue.

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Campus Radicalism Spirals Out of Control Academic-Industrial-Complex moves deeper into Brown-Shirt state. April 11, 2019 Jack Kerwick

Posted By on April 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273389/campus-radicalism-spirals-out-control-jack-kerwick

Just when the unprejudiced observer thought that it was impossible, the world of “Higher Education,” or what I not so affectionately refer to as “the Academic-Industrial-Complex,” continues to move ever-further leftward.

At George Mason University, the institution at which Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh holds a post as a Visiting Law Professor, students are up in arms.

The newly confirmed Justice had just signed a three-year contract with GMU’s Antonin Scalia Law School. Kavanaugh is scheduled to co-teach this summer with Jennifer Mascot, his former clerk, a class in England. Yet some students—approximately 2,000 who signed a petition that they have labeled, “Mason 4 Survivors”—are having none of it, demanding that GMU administrators promptly terminate Kavanaugh’s employment and “void ALL contracts and affiliation” with him.

Unsurprisingly, this recently formed student group has made other demands, including demands for the creation of the position of a round-the-clock, on-campus “Sexual Assault Coordinator” and a formal apology issued by GMU administrators for hiring Kavanaugh in the first place.

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Netanyahu Wins Defense of the Jewish homeland is the voters’ paramount concern. Joseph Klein

Posted By on April 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273444/netanyahu-wins-joseph-klein

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have secured enough votes for his conservative Likud party to form a right-wing, ultra-orthodox coalition government. Based on vote totals calculated the morning after Tuesday’s vote, the Likud party itself tallied 26.27% of the vote, which translates to 35 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. Along with five supportive right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties that amassed enough votes collectively to secure about 30 seats amongst them, Prime Minister Netanyahu is eyeing a 65-seat governing majority. Likud’s main challenger, the Blue and White party, led by the former chief of the Israel Defense Forces Benny Gantz along with former finance minister Yair Lapid, came in a close second with 25.94% of the vote. Although the Blue and White party’s vote total appears enough to also entitle it to 35 seats in the Knesset, it is nowhere near being able to reach the magic majority number of 61 seats with eligible coalition partners. Thus, barring some unforeseen occurrence, Prime Minister Netanyahu is on his way to commencing a record-setting fifth term, albeit under the cloud of possible indictment on bribery and other corruption charges.  

President Trump wasted no time in congratulating Prime Minister Netanyahu for his victory. “He’s been a great ally and he’s a friend, I’d like to congratulate Bibi Netanyahu, that was a well-thought out race I can tell you,” President Trump said on Wednesday.

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Amherst College’s Glossary of ‘Wokeness’ By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on April 11th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/amherst-colleges-glossary-of-wokeness/

Campus politics are increasingly deranged, and college administrators have a lot to answer for.

When Samuel Abrams, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, surveyed national data on the political views of college administrators, he revealed that liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts at a ratio of twelve-to-one, and suggested (oh so gently) in a New York Times op-ed that this kind of imbalance might be a problem for “the free and open exchange of ideas.”

As detailed here by yours truly and here by National Review’s David French, Abrams was then treated appallingly by Sarah Lawrence College’s students and staff.

Abrams’s basic point – that students arrive on campus fairly liberal and are taught by very liberal professors and socialized by extremely liberal administrators – should concern anyone who cares about the integrity of higher education.

Last month a document produced by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s Resource Center Team at Amherst College in Massachusetts, titled “Common Language Guide,” surfaced. The document was described by its authors as a “list of carefully researched and thoughtfully discussed definitions for key diversity and inclusion terms.”

And what did they come up with? A slew of rather obscure definitions of oppressive behaviors and structures such as “eurocentrism,” “heterosexism,” “ethnosexism,” “cissexism,” as well as more heard-of terms such as “ageism,” “classism,” and “racism.”

“Microaggressions,” the document explained, are “rooted in institutional oppression” and involve “verbal and nonverbal indignities and denigrating messages targeting people of historically and presently marginalized backgrounds.” This translates as insults, both accidental and deliberate. (Insults and slights are unpleasant, but are they really so ideologically loaded? Might this be encouraging people to be overly sensitive?)

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Barr Confirms Multiple Intel Agencies Implicated In Anti-Trump Spy Operation ‘I’m not talking about the FBI necessarily, but intelligence agencies more broadly,’ Barr said. Mollie Hemingway

Posted By on April 11th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/10/barr-confirms-multiple-intel-agencies-implicated-in-anti-trump-spy-operation/

“Spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” Attorney General William Barr told a Senate committee on Wednesday morning. Barr’s comments came in the context of potential Justice Department reviews of the Trump-Russia investigation and how it began in 2016.

While it is important that the top law enforcement in the United States publicly acknowledged that the Obama administration and its intelligence agencies surveilled its domestic political opponents during the heat of a presidential election, it is what he said next that was most startling: that the CIA and other federal agencies in addition to the FBI may have been involved. “I’m not talking about the FBI necessarily, but intelligence agencies more broadly,” he said.

The FBI, which has incredibly friendly relations with the media, has taken the brunt of the public outcry against the anti-Trump operation. That project included the use of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants, national security letters, human informants, and strategic leaking to craft a narrative of treasonous collusion with Russia to steal an election from Hillary Clinton. It even included leaks of classified records from former FBI director James Comey, which he said was done for the purpose of launching a special counsel investigation as retaliation for his firing.

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Enemies of the Obama State Attorney General William Barr says the government spied on the Trump campaign in 2016. James Freeman

Posted By on April 11th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/spying-did-occur-11554932442

The Attorney General of the United States told a Senate subcommittee today that the federal government spied on a U.S. political campaign in 2016. Now Americans need to know which executive branch officials were responsible for turning Washington’s formidable surveillance powers against the party out of power.

The Journal reports:

Attorney General William Barr will ask a team inside the Justice Department to examine the origins of the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia, he told Congress on Wednesday, responding to lingering Republican concerns about law enforcement decisions during the 2016 election.

Mr. Barr characterized the law-enforcement activities that were directed at people affiliated with the Trump campaign as “spying,” telling a Senate panel that he will examine the gamut of intelligence activities that were directed at members of the campaign in 2016, looking at how and why surveillance decisions were made.

“I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” Mr. Barr said in a hearing, invoking Vietnam-era intelligence abuses, such as the surveillance of antiwar activists as a reason to raise these questions. “Spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated.”

It is a big deal, even if much of the press corps runs every development in this story through the filter of whether it is good news or bad news for Donald Trump. It is unconditionally bad news for the citizens of a free society if it becomes acceptable for the government to spy on domestic political opponents.

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What They Don’t Teach You at the University of Washington’s Ed School by Nick Wilson

Posted By on April 10th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/04/05/what-they-dont-

“Another interesting and lengthy feature in STEP are “Theatre of the Oppressed” workshops. These mandatory theatre performances stretch on for weeks, and in them white male students are asked to act out scenes in which they are cast as racist, homophobic, or misogynistic characters. Students and instructors then parse the performances and discuss the dynamics of identity that play out in each scene.”

Having decided to become a high school teacher, I was excited to be accepted to the University of Washington’s Secondary Teacher Education Program (STEP), which awards a masters degree in teaching and bills itself as a 12-month combination of theory and practice. Cognizant that in just over a year I would be responsible for teaching students on my own, and because of the university’s laudable reputation, I expected the program to be grounded in challenging practical work and research, both in terms of how to develop academic skills in young people, and also in the crucial role public education has in overcoming some of the most grave and intransigent problems in society.

I am not interested in politics or controversy, and I derive no pleasure in creating difficulties for the UW out of personal resentment. But whenever family and friends ask me about graduate school, I have to explain that rather than an academic program centered around pedagogy and public policy, STEP is a 12-month immersion in doctrinaire social justice activism. This program is a bizarre political experiment, light on academic rigor, in which the faculty quite consciously whips up emotions in order to punch home its ideological message. As a consequence, the key components of teaching as a vocation—pedagogy and how best to disseminate knowledge—are fundamentally neglected. With little practical training or preparation, graduates of the program begin their teaching careers woefully unprepared. Even for the most ardent social justice activist, STEP’s lack of practical content is a serious shortcoming. I found the program so troubling that I have decided to write this first-hand account with specific examples of the daily experience to illustrate how social justice activism in the academy has a high opportunity cost.

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Barr Forms Team to Probe Possible FBI Abuses In Trump-Russia Investigation By Jack Crowe

Posted By on April 10th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/barr-forms-team-to-probe-possible-fbi-abuses-in-trump-russia-investigation/

Attorney General William Barr has formed a team to investigate potential abuses by FBI and Department of Justice officials involved in the the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia in the summer of 2016, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

Congressional Republicans have for the past year called for a thorough accounting of the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, which many of them believe began as a result of anti-Trump bias on the part of senior DOJ and FBI officials.

“I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016,” Barr told the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday.

The investigation that will reportedly be carried out by Barr’s newly-formed team comes atop the existing DOJ Inspector General investigation into the origins of the counterintelligence probe, which Barr has said should be completed as early as May or June.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has emerged as perhaps the most vocal Republican calling for further investigation into whether FBI officials misled the FISA court by failing to disclose that the Steele dossier — an unverified opposition research file that was used as a pretext in the FISA application to surveil Carter Page — was initially funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

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Top FBI Lawyer Testified Rosenstein Discussed Removing Trump From Office By Madeline Osburn

Posted By on April 10th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/10/top-fbi-lawyer-testified-rosenstein-discussed-removing-trump-office/

James Baker, the former top lawyer of the FBI, testified to members of Congress last fall that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and other FBI officials discussed wearing a wire in meetings with President Trump and removing him from office, according to a transcript of Baker’s testimony released on Tuesday.

In a joint committee on October 3, 2018, Baker was questioned in a closed-door interview on his knowledge of the Christopher Steele dossier, classified information leaked to the media, and invoking the 25th Amendment against President Trump.

Baker’s testimony confirmed what former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe previously said about national security officials strategizing to remove President Trump from office. Baker said Rosenstein made a serious suggestion to wear a wire when near the president in order to collect evidence that the president obstructed the investigation on Russian collusion. Baker also said he suspected Rosenstein was acting in response to the firing of James Comey, and that he felt he had been “used” by the president in his justification for firing Comey.