EDUCATION Comments turned off

Student Found to Have Violated Title IX by Asking Another Student on a Date By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on December 28th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/student-found-to-have-violated-title-ix-by-asking-another-student-on-a-date/
Dating can be awkward enough without adding legal hazards to the mix.

A student at the University of Missouri was found to be in violation of Title IX because he asked another student out on a date and is physically larger than she is.

According to a deposition about the case, the male student was deemed to have violated civil-rights law — and was guilty of sexual harassment — because he asked a female student out on a date that she did not want. Why? Because he was bigger than her, and his “physical size” meant that “he was perceived as having power over her.”

The deposition gained some attention after it was shared by KC Johnson, a Brooklyn College professor, on Twitter. It’s not clear from the documents what kind of punishment, if any, the student faced for his violation — but the fact that an official even deemed what he did to be a violation is scary enough.

Sexual harassment and discrimination are both very serious issues, and it’s important to have policies in place to protect people from them. This, however, is quite clearly a total abuse and misuse of Title IX.

It would be one thing if this student were a teacher or other type of authority figure. Then I could certainly understand how that would be sexual harassment. But this was not the case. This was simply one student asking another student out on a date, which, believe it or not, is completely normal and appropriate human behavior. So what if he was bigger than her? Spoiler alert: Most men are bigger than most women. If it’s a violation to ask out a woman who is smaller than you, then both men and women are going to have a lot fewer options in their romantic lives.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Trump ‘Ethics’ Resistance An army of nonprofits may be a foe more formidable than the Democratic House. By Kimberley A. Strassel

Posted By on December 28th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-ethics-resistance-11545955715

The Trump ‘Ethics’ Resistance An army of nonprofits may be a foe more formidable than the Democratic House. By Kimberley A. Strassel
Powerful House Democrats are about to blitz the Trump administration with subpoenas and investigations. Pay attention to their nonprofit helpers, many of which are new.
For nearly a decade, the left has decried the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which restored speech freedoms and enabled hundreds of tea-party groups. For just as long, they have bitterly criticized conservative watchdogs such as Judicial Watch, which they accuse of using litigation to hound the Obama administration. Various liberals have called Judicial Watch a “smear sausage” factory, identified it as the epicenter of “Clinton Derangement Syndrome” and accused it of “weaponizing the Freedom of Information Act for political purposes.”

But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Judicial Watch has many great admirers. Progressive nonprofits are popping up all over Washington, shepherded by powerful liberal political players, funded by sources unknown, modeled on conservative groups and united in burying the Trump administration under a mountain of scandal. The White House would do well to understand that in some ways these groups are its most potent threat.
Consider Democracy Forward, which launched last year with a mission of “fighting government corruption in court.” Sound familiar? The board includes Marc Elias, the Democratic lawyer behind the infamous Steele dossier, and John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. It’s a big operation as these things go, with a staff composed largely of Obama administration lawyers and advisers. And it’s already touting a packet of FOIA demands and lawsuits against the administration.
American Oversight, also created last year, bills itself as “the top Freedom of Information Act litigator investigating the Trump Administration.” It’s chief counsel, John Bies, served eight years in the Obama Justice Department, and its website already lists 19 team members, mostly lawyers. In addition to a flood of FOIA demands, the group helped lead opposition to Justice Brett Kavanaugh. That included filing a lawsuit on behalf of yet another new nonprofit, Fix the Court, demanding all Kavanaugh documents from the Justice Department. CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

MARK STEYN ON “LONE WOLF” PLURAL

Posted By on December 28th, 2018

https://www.steynonline.com/9111/lone-but-motley

A week before Christmas two young ladies from Scandinavia vacationing in Morocco – Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway – were brutally stabbed and decapitated and then had the final moments of their lives uploaded as triumphal snuff videos to Facebook, Twitter, 4Chan and Reddit, the Four Horsemen of the Social-Media Apocalypse.

Fortunately, if you were thinking of getting a little nervous about your next holiday in the Maghreb, this bloody double-murder was the work of merely another “lone wolf”:

In a press conference in Rabat yesterday, police and domestic intelligence spokesman Boubker Sabik labelled the suspects “lone wolves”…

Wait a minute: “lone wolves” plural? You mean, the wolf wasn’t lone? No, indeed:

What ‘lone wolf’ gang did before Scandinavian tourist beheadings

There’s a whole gang of lone wolves?

A motley crew of “lone wolves”, including two street vendors, a plumber and a carpenter, hunted backpackers to kill in the Moroccan mountains.

At last count, nineteen “lone wolves” have been arrested for the double-murder. That’s a rugby team plus bridge four of lone wolves. They’re the least lonesome lone wolves in town.

And are they really that “motley”? (See photo above for representative three-nineteenths of the lone wolf pack.)

For almost a decade, I have made mocking reference to Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. But there’s no point to jokes, is there? Because, as absurd as they are, you wait a year or two and everybody’s doing them entirely straight-faced. The phrase “lone wolf” was created by the Pansy Media to ward off the suggestion that all these lone wolves might have something in common. Just as “all politics is local”, all jihad is lone. And, if you use the phrase often enough, it has such a pleasing anesthetizing effect you don’t even notice that you’re sitting there typing, perfectly seriously, about a gang of nineteen lone wolves.

Same number as the 9/11 hijackers, by coincidence. But we hadn’t yet taken refuge in such halfwit evasions.

Needless to say, the decapitation video went “viral”. Among those who were “spammed” with pictures of the severed heads were the mums of the girls, whose first Christmas without their beloved daughters was further enlivened by social-media enthusiasts posting snaps of the decapitated women to their mothers’ Facebook pages. But Big Social Brother knows its priorities: It was too busy banning Robert Spencer, whose Jihad Watch website is one of the few remaining outlets that doesn’t take refuge in platitudinous drivel about “lone wolves”.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum Ill-boding for Israel’s enemies

Posted By on December 27th, 2018

https://www.jns.org/opinion/ill-boding-for-israels-enemies/

Fortunately for Israel and the United States, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu possesses an uncanny ability to function on multiple fronts simultaneously.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed this week “to act vigorously and continuously against the Iranian military entrenchment in Syria.”

Addressing graduates of the Israel Air Force cadets’ pilot course on Wednesday, he said, “You have one mission: to defend the homeland and be victorious in war. [This] starts with eradicating major hostile threats.”

Netanyahu went on to assert that U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent decision to withdraw American troops from Syria “will not change our policy.”

The speech was eerily fitting, as it came mere hours after the IAF conducted massive strikes on Iranian targets near Damascus. Referring to the operation, which was condemned by Russia as “provocative,” IAF Commander Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin said that “in several arenas and over a wide scope, our jets protected [our positions] and attacked [those of the enemy]. With exceptional cooperation from the Intelligence branch, we prevented the establishment of an Iranian military capability on [Israel’s] northern front. It is not the end of the story, and if called on to do so [again], we will act on the ground and from the air.”

Netanyahu’s and Norkin’s words were not only directed at the new group of fighter pilots tasked with keeping Iran and its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, from attempting to annihilate the Jewish state. The joint message was also aimed at Tehran, Damascus, Beirut and Moscow.

The verbal warning was as clear as Tuesday night’s military one: that Trump’s exit from the region does not signal the onset of Israeli defeatism. If anything, it bodes even more ill for Israel’s enemies.

One indication that those enemies are getting the picture is Syria’s response to the airstrikes. This took the form of a letter of lament to the United Nations, stating that “Israel’s continuous aggressive policy is possible due to the unlimited and consistent support of the American administration.”

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Death and Mystery of Jan Masaryk By Geoffrey Luck

Posted By on December 27th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/12/the-death-and-mystery-of-jan-masaryk/

A mere two weeks after Stalin’s puppets took control of Czechoslovakia, foreign minister and national hero Jan Masaryk was found dead in the courtyard below his apartment. There was no suicide note nor hint of explanation beyond an enigmatic Bible verse. Today, seven decades on, the who, why and how remain a riddle that grows ever more intriguing.

Hands up those of you who remember Jan Masaryk (left) and the mystery of his death, seventy years ago? In the swirl of historical developments in the aftermath of World War II, his was a headline fodder, at the centre of events as diverse as the fight to establish the state of Israel and the encroachment of the Soviet bloc. Now, a new theory purports to explain how he fell victim to the double-dealing of the Cold War.

The basic facts of the case are simple: two weeks after the Communist takeover of the government in Czechoslovakia, Masaryk, the Foreign Minister, was found dead in his pyjamas, on the courtyard cobblestones below his apartment in the Foreign Ministry’s Cerninsky Palace. The Soviet Union had occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II, and it had seemed likely would try to install a Communist government, as it had in Poland, East Germany and elsewhere. Masaryk had dealt skilfully with Stalin, assuring him that a democratic nation posed no security threat to Russia. Then he blundered, proposing to accept aid under America’s Marshall Plan, something Russia could not allow.

When news of his death flashed around Prague on the morning of March 10, 1948, the immediate official explanation was that he had jumped from the bathroom window of the apartment, on the third floor. (In Europe, the ground floor is counted as Level 1, not G). But immediately there were suspicions of murder. Masaryk’s death was a double shock to the little nation, still adapting to life under Communist rule. He was a national hero, the son of Czechoslovakia’s first president, Tomas Garrique Masaryk, regarded as the founder of the nation. Like de Gaulle, he had gone into exile in Britain with his president, Edvard Benes, at the Nazi invasion, and had broadcast regularly on the BBC to inspire citizens and partisans in his homeland.

In February, when Communist Prime Minister Klement Gottwald demanded a Communist-dominated cabinet, twelve democratic politicians resigned en masse in protest, but Masaryk did not. His reasons were never articulated, but friends believed he decided to stay on, in the hope of moderating the Soviet policies. It was claimed that he did this with a heavy heart, feeling pressures from both east and west. The official line was that he was suffering from depression and insomnia, badly hurt by British and American criticisms of his decision to remain in office. A press report from Prague the day after his death claimed that he had been held a virtual prisoner in his apartment, surrounded by new secretaries, and not permitted to meet visitors alone.

Bit by bit, suggestive evidence dribbled out. The police doctor who certified the death as a suicide did not attend the autopsy. He himself was found dead a few weeks later, another suicide. Plaster was allegedly found under the fingernails of the corpse; there were marks on the walls of the room as if he had pressed his hands against them while resisting. He left no suicide note. Then the former Justice Minister was savagely beaten, his body dumped beneath the window of his flat.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Modern Manifestations of the Oldest Hatred: Peter Arnold

Posted By on December 27th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/12/the-modern-manifestations-of-the-oldest-hatred/

As Paul Johnson put it, “What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria makes sense.” Nevertheless it continues. Some random thoughts on the latest upsurge.

Aghast at what scenes were revealed for all the world to see when Allied troops liberated Hitlers’s death camps, ‘the world’s longest hatred’ went into a quick decline. Apart from a few remaining extreme ‘crazies’ who had believed Hitler’s rantings about Jews, to be thought of as being an antisemite was socially and politically unacceptable. In this atmosphere, and following a remarkable volte face at the United Nations by Stalin’s historically antisemitic, pogrom-ridden Russia, legal effect was given to the Balfour Declaration and the State of Israel was born. Stalin even allowed vassal Czechoslovakia to supply the new state with arms.

The nations’ consciences about their own millennia of Christian antisemitism did not, however, extend to sending troops to defend Israel when it was immediately attacked, at birth, by the armies (some British-trained and even initially British led—for example by Glubb Pasha) of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The nations simply watched and waited for all the Jews to be exterminated. To their surprise, the Jews won that war and set about establishing their nation, which they have since defended in succeeding wars against enemies determined to “drive them into the sea”.

But so long-standing a hatred as antisemitism was not going to give up easily.

It was not long before ‘Holocaust denial’ emerged. The Nazis and their allies had not murdered Jews— they had died of diseases in the camps; it was not possible for six million people to be murdered and for no one to know about it—the numbers must merely have been hundreds of thousands. And so on. Holocaust denial is not dead, not even after the devastating legal setback by arch-denier David Irving when he sued Deborah Lipstadt in a British Court. Although, and perhaps because, the Iranian President continues to deny that the Holocaust occurred, Holocaust denial still has a bad name.

But a new version of antisemitism has emerged in, of all places, academia. As in Australia, academia in many western countries has been taken over by the ideologically-driven Left. Part of the underlying ideology holds that no person is any better than another, that no person has any claim greater than that of another, that no nation or culture is better than any other and that, whatever the cost, all must be made equal, like it or not. And what better example to pick on that Jewish Israel?

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Illegal Alien Gang Member Kills 12-Year-Old Boy December 27, 2018 Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 27th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/272375/illegal-alien-gang-member-kills-12-year-old-boy-daniel-greenfield

The same media whose tears never dry when it comes to illegal aliens will maintain dry eyes and tight lips when it comes to stories like these.

Police in Connecticut have arrested an 18-year-old undocumented immigrant from Jamaica on murder charges related to the shooting death of an innocent 12-year-old boy a week before Christmas.

He might have murdered a little boy, but not even the Daily Mail will dare call him an illegal alien. He’s an undocumented killer.

Three juveniles who police said were with Chambers that night, ages 12, 14 and 16, are facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder; carrying a pistol or revolver without a permit and larceny.

According to police, at 9pm on December 18, Howell was returning home from getting snacks at a convenience store around the corner when Chambers opened fire, reported Fox61.

Investigators said Howell was an innocent bystander, not Chambers’ intended target, who was the victim’s older cousin.

CTpost.com reported, citing police sources, that earlier that evening, Chambers and his alleged co-conspirators were driving in a stolen car when they got into an argument with some people walking along Willow Street, among them Howell’s relative.

It looks a lot like gang violence. And migration continues to be a major driving force behind gang violence and gang violence drives the high gun violence rate. Plenty of the gang violence is obviously domestic, but plenty of it is coming from foreign gangs.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Cartel Jihad Rap Sinaloa Cartel recruiting gangster jihadists. Dawn Perlmutter and Doyle Quiggle

Posted By on December 27th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272321/cartel-jihad-rap-dawn-perlmutter

Chérif Chekatt, the 29-year-old perpetrator of the December 11, 2018, mass shooting in Strasbourg, France was designated a gangster jihadist by French Police. The term refers to people previously convicted of various crimes and radicalized in prison. Chekatt, a French born citizen was a hardened criminal with 27 convictions in France, Germany, and Switzerland.

Gangster-jihadists are not just recruited in prison by Islamic extremists. The Sinaloa Cartel appears to have seized upon the opportunity to recruit and exploit hundreds of locals in France and Germany, including children and refugees already primed by jihadist propaganda, many possessing criminal records and combat experience. International law enforcement agencies have long known that Hezbollah launder money for the Sinaloa cartel. Recently, German law enforcement have been aggressively disrupting the criminal operations of traditional Arab Clans in Berlin and even the operations of La Cosa Nostra. Neither are known to have been affiliated with Sinaloa or Hezbollah. Sinaloa have quickly filled the narco-vacuum, similar to how the Cali Cartel took over Pablo Escobar’s market after the DEA killed him. The sudden and alarming proliferation of top-shelf weaponry among Hamas and Hezbollah on the Israeli border is very likely the consequence of a renewed and strengthened alliance between them and Sinaloa, in which German-based “refugees” deal Sinaloan coke and heroin and kick part of the profits back to their Iran-based handlers, Hezbollah who, in turn, shuffle weapons over to Lebanon. This arrangement provides Iran deniability, while also providing Sinaloa broader access to and deeper penetration of the German narco market, as well as plenty of easy money to SUV-driving, Gucci-toting “refugees.”

Music and accompanying videos of German Rappers further indicate a new alliance of transnational criminal organizations drug trafficking and Islamic State terrorism. Jihadist sympathizers and Islamic State fighters have long embraced hip-hop culture, specifically gangsta rap, to promote and disseminate their message via the Internet and social media. ‘Jihad Rap’ was a successful recruitment tool targeting young men who felt dispossessed and marginalized, one of the most notorious being the German rapper and ISIS terrorist, Denis Cuspert, aka “Deso Dog”. After the fall of the Islamic State Caliphate a new form of gangsta rap emerged in Germany. Best described as ‘Cartel Jihad Rap’ it is a combination of Islamic State nasheed, jihad rap and narco-cultura.

Fawzi Yamouni aka Fousy is a German rapper and producer of Algerian origin from Siegen, Germany. Chérif Chekatt’s most recent prison sentence was served in Singen, Germany. He was radicalized in the infamous area of Konstanz, a town that borders France and has been a hub of Islamic radicalism since the mid-1990s. Many of Germany’s prisons are now effective recruiting stations and training camps for cartel jihadis. Chekatt was expelled to France after his release in 2017.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Should Veto MLB’s Foul Deal with Cuba By Elliott Abrams

Posted By on December 27th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/mlb-cuba-deal-payoff-to-communist-regime/

Don’t steal from players’ salaries to fund a Communist regime.

Major League Baseball has made a foul new deal with the Cuban regime, and the Trump administration can and should block it. The deal rewards and perpetuates Cuba’s Communist-style system in which players are the property of the state, not free individuals who can sell their talents on the open market.

For decades, Cuba has refused to let baseball players emigrate freely and join the major leagues. The result has been dangerous escapes, sometimes on flimsy rafts, by players making their way to the United States. Yasiel Puig’s escape from Cuba, where the star was paid $17 a month, was detailed in LA Magazine in 2014 and involved risky deals with smugglers. As the magazine explained, “Under Major League Baseball’s byzantine rules and the U.S. Treasury Department’s outdated restrictions, the only way for a Cuban ballplayer to become a free agent — and score a fat contract — is to first establish residency in a third country. That detour is a fiction, winked at from all sides, and one that gives traffickers command over the middle crossing.”

This story of human trafficking, of exploitation by a Communist state, and of dangerous escapes from Cuba was overlooked by Major League Baseball. The basic attitude was willful blindness: We will deal with you if you show up, and there is no interest in how you got here.

The cure for that situation was simple: Change the rules so that any Cuban player who escapes to freedom can sign a contract. The fake “residency in a third country” rule could easily have been eliminated — and the leagues also could have lobbied the U.S. government to force Cuba to free up its players. But that’s not what the Major Leagues have done.

Instead, baseball owners have negotiated a deal with the FCB, the Cuban Baseball Federation, in which they bribe the Cuban regime with part of a player’s salary. And they’re asking the Trump administration to sign off on this plan by granting an exception to the Cuban embargo.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

4 Foreign Policy Establishment Myths About Leaving Syria, Debunked Trump’s decision nips further mission creep in the bud and refocuses the national security bureaucracy on the right priorities.By Daniel DePetris

Posted By on December 27th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/27/4-foreign-policy-establishment-myths-leaving-syria-debunked/

Since President Donald Trump’s directive to withdraw U.S. ground forces from Syria, the foreign policy elite keep levying complaints. While the people opposing Trump’s Syria decision may be loud, that doesn’t make them right.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio called the decision “a mistake,” while Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham used increasingly creative language to get the president’s attention by relentlessly tweeting about how “ecstatic” the Iranians must be. Indeed, with every passing hour, establishment politicians and conventional foreign policy thinkers are deploying increasingly desperate arguments to make their case about why American boots still need to be on the ground in Syria.

Curiously, they never seem to have a realistic end-game in mind. Let’s dispel some of the myths they are propagating.
1. U.S. Credibility Will Be Eroded

The American people are often told that the United States is only as effective around the world as it is credible. Yet credibility is a subjective term, a politically appealing instrument interventionists invoke when they have no better argument to make. As my colleague Benjamin Friedman wrote back in 2014, “A good rule of thumb for foreign policy is that if someone tells you our credibility depends [on] doing something, it’s probably a bad idea.”

This rule applies in the case of Syria. Washington’s fixation on maintaining supposed credibility can easily lead to terrible foreign policy decisions of dubious import. History is full of examples when presidents, lawmakers, and national security hawks continued or escalated U.S. military involvement in an overseas conflict — Vietnam and Iraq being the two prominent case studies over the last 50 years. The result has almost always been bad for U.S. security, blinding us to the far more important discussion of whether intervention is actually worth the risk.
2. Iran and Russia Will Win

Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez stated in a press conference: “To withdraw without success is failure. … If we leave, Russia and Iran dictate our strategic interests.” In other words: If the United States leaves, the mullahs and Vladimir Putin will swallow Syria whole.

What Menendez and many of his colleagues conveniently don’t mention is the context. For one, Syria’s political future has always been vastly more vital for Iran and Russia’s foreign policy interests than it has for the United States. Under no circumstances would Tehran and Moscow be open to Bashar al-Assad’s resignation; Assad may be a bloodthirsty, sinister, and incompetent dictator, but he was a useful proxy to both countries.

To the Iranians, Assad provided a strategic relationship in an otherwise indelibly hostile Arab world — a man who was willing to take cues from Tehran because his security often depended on doing so. For the Russians, Assad resembled a secular authoritarian who allowed the Russian navy to dock at Tartus, the only warm-water port Moscow had. Both Iran and Russia invested heavily in Syria’s civil war over the past seven years precisely because a post-Assad Syria would be a fundamental blow to both.

To the United States, however, Syria’s strategic position never really mattered. Washington does not require a cooperative Syria in order to fulfill its national security goals in the Middle East, including the establishment of a functional balance of power and defense of Americans from terrorist attacks. The bottom line is that the United States is well positioned regardless of whether Assad is in the presidential palace.
3. The Kurds Will Be Abandoned

While it’s understandable that Syrian Kurdish fighters are angry about the coming U.S. troop withdrawal — viewing any decrease as a betrayal after years of coordination in the field — the fact is that U.S.-Kurdish ties were never more than a tactical arrangement. The Syrian Kurds saw Washington’s airpower as a highly valuable asset to save their communities from further ISIS encroachment, and Washington views the Syrian Kurds as useful local forces to squeeze the organization’s territorial “caliphate.”