ISRAEL Comments turned off

Mahmoud Abbas: Fresh American Blood on His Hands Abbas’s Responsibility for Murder by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on September 17th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13001/abbas-ari-fuld-murder

According to Palestinian terrorist groups, the terrorist, Khalil Jabarin, decided to murder a Jew in response to Israeli “crimes” against the Al-Aqsa Mosque in particular and Islamic holy sites in general. Needless to say, there is no Israeli plan to allow Jews to pray inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The statements made by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad confirm that there is a direct link between Abbas’s false charge against Israel and the murder of the Israeli-American citizen.

Abbas’s latest fabrication is directly responsible for the murder of Ari Fuld, stabbed to death by a terrorist who actually believed Abbas’s lies about a purported Israeli scheme to split the Al-Aqsa Mosque between Muslims and Jews.In a speech before the PLO Executive Committee in Ramallah on September 15, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas repeated the old libel that Israel was planning to establish special Jewish prayer zones inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Abbas claimed that Israel was seeking to copy the example of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, where Jews and Muslims pray in different sections.

Abbas did not say what his lie was based on. He also did provide any evidence of Israel’s ostensible plot against the Al-Aqsa Mosque. He said, nevertheless, that the Palestinians, together with Jordan, were planning to bring this issue before the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

Abbas’s allegation was quickly picked up by several media outlets in the Arab world, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The headlines that appeared on websites affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second largest terrorist group in the Gaza Strip, claimed that Israel is planning to permit Jews to pray inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Study Warns Against Saying ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ By Toni Airaksinen (????!!!!)

Posted By on September 17th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/study-warns-against-saying-boys-will-be-boys/

A new University of Michigan study urges preschool teachers to avoid saying “they’re just boys being boys” or to remind girls to have “good manners,” lest those teachers accidentally “contribute to gender inequality in early childhood.”

Heidi Gansen — who previously was awarded by the American Sociological Association for her research on “heteronormativity” in preschools — published her latest study in the new issue of the journal Sex Roles.

For her new study, “Push-Ups Versus Clean Up: Preschool Teachers Gendered Beliefs,” Gansen spent 400 hours in Michigan preschools from July 2015 to April 2016. During that time, UM awarded Gansen more than $23,000 in research grants, according to her CV.

Gansen begins by setting the stage: teachers have a strong influence on children.

Preschools are just one way “through which an unequal gender system is reproduced because interactions between teachers and students organize and define boys and girls differently,” explains Gansen, who taught at UM before she graduated this spring.

Gansen sought to answer two questions.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Woodward: No Evidence of Trump-Russia Collusion By Rick Moran

Posted By on September 17th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/woodward-no-evidence-of-trump-russia-collusion/

Bob Woodward, whose bestselling anti-Trump book Fear has got Washington tongues wagging, told talk show host Hugh Hewitt on Friday that despite looking “hard” for two years, he could find no evidence of collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians in the 2016 presidential election.

HH: So let’s set aside the Comey firing, which as a Constitutional law professor, no one will ever persuade me can be obstruction. And Rod Rosenstein has laid out reasons why even if those weren’t the president’s reasons. Set aside the Comey firing. Did you, Bob Woodward, hear anything in your research in your interviews that sounded like espionage or collusion?

BW: I did not, and of course, I looked for it, looked for it hard. And so you know, there we are. We’re going to see what Mueller has, and Dowd may be right. He has something that Dowd and the president don’t know about, a secret witness or somebody who has changed their testimony. As you know, that often happens, and that can break open or turn a case.

HH: But you’ve seen no collusion?

BW: I have not.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israeli-American Fatally Stabbed in the West Bank Attack by a Palestinian teen comes amid rising tensions in the region By Felicia Schwartz

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israeli-american-fatally-stabbed-in-the-west-bank-1537114584?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=contextual&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

TEL AVIV—A Palestinian teenager on Sunday fatally stabbed a 45-year-old Israeli-American man in the West Bank, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.

The man, Ari Fuld, was a right-wing pro-Israel activist who had a following on social media. He was killed at a shopping mall near the Gush Etzion junction that has been the site of similar incidents in recent years. The junction and mall are frequented by both Israelis and Palestinians.

The Israeli military described the stabbing—the second such incident this summer—as an act of terror. No group claimed responsibility for the attack, and there were no signs that it was related to Mr. Fuld’s pro-Israel postings.

The attack comes amid heightened tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been demonstrating at the border with Israel to call for the right to return each week, in protests that have often turned violent. Israeli forces have responded with live fire and have killed more than 150 Palestinians since March.

Mr. Fuld lived with his family in Efrat, a settlement in the West Bank, and was married with four children. He was also a reserve member of the Israeli military.

Videos of the scene circulated on social media show that Mr. Fuld chased and shot at his attacker before collapsing.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israel Strikes Iranian Arms Shipment at Damascus Airport Missiles latest in a string of attacks aimed at checking Iran in Syria By Sune Engel Rasmussen in Beirut

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-strikes-iranian-arms-shipment-at-damascus-airport-1537092486

Israeli missiles are suspected to have struck an Iranian arms shipment at Damascus airport late Saturday, the latest in a string of attacks aimed at eroding Tehran’s military foothold in Syria.

The strikes play into a broader conflict unfolding in the Middle East. The fight against Islamic State militants, who have been driven from their strongholds in Syria and Iraq, has given way to a jostling for power among foreign and regional actors.

Israel has watched with concern as Iran has entrenched itself deeper in Syria on the back of its support for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, which has reclaimed most of the territory once held by antigovernment rebels.

Over the past year, Israel has sharply increased airstrikes against Iranian assets in Syria, striking targets from its own border area to the far eastern part of the country to neighborhoods near the capital, Damascus.

Saturday’s strike seemingly targeted a warehouse and a recently arrived arms shipment from Iran to the Lebanese Hezbollah militia, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based monitoring group, which said the launched missiles were likely Israeli.

According to a news report by the Israeli Hadashot TV Sunday morning, the strike also hit an Iranian cargo plane loaded with weapons, which had recently landed at Damascus International Airport from Tehran.

The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported that the country’s air defenses repelled some of the incoming missiles, which it said were fired from Israel.

People in Damascus posted footage on social media showing explosions that they described as the airport being hit. The were no immediate reports of casualties.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

John Kerry, Meet George Logan Is it a crime to meet with Iranian officials? It may well be. Seth Lipsky

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-kerry-meet-george-logan-1537129799

George Logan, call your office. That’s my reaction to news that former Secretary of State John Kerry has, by his own account, been meeting privately with Iranian officials to try to save the nuclear deal.

Logan was the Pennsylvania politician whose unauthorized efforts to end the Quasi-War between France and America led to the Logan Act of 1799, which outlaws freelance diplomacy.

The New York Post has called Mr. Kerry’s conniving a “textbook violation” of the law. President Trump, after all, has pulled out of the nuclear accord and decided on a different course. Iran’s leaders, at least for the moment, are hanging onto the deal. Why not? It has brought billions to their coffers as they expand their military campaigns in the Mideast.

Last week the New York Times quoted “experts” as suggesting that the ayatollahs are “gambling” that Mr. Trump will be “crippled” in the midterm elections or swept out of office in 2020.

So have the Democrats been colluding with them? Or, as radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Kerry last week, has the former secretary of state been “trying to coach” Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif?

“That’s not how it works,” Mr. Kerry said. “What I have done is tried to elicit from him what Iran might be willing to do in order to change the dynamic in the Middle East.” He insisted he’d been “very blunt.” Mr. Kerry also told Mr. Hewitt that the administration appears “hell-bent-for-leather determined to pursue a regime change strategy” in Iran. “I would simply caution that the United States historically has not had a great record in regime change,” Mr. Kerry said. He added that it makes it “very difficult, if not impossible” for Iran to negotiate.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why Can’t I Criticize My Religion? by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12944/islam-criticism

On the surface, for those who wanted to reform Islam, the only place to do so appeared to be the West. We all assumed that here in the West, it would be safe to question and criticize. Instead, so many institutions utilize a far more subtle method of silencing criticism.
The more you conceal or disregard constructive criticism of Islam, the harder you are making it for reforms to occur in the religion and the easier you are making it for Muslim radicals to prevail.
The reason I criticize the radical elements of my religion is not because I have hatred in my heart, but because I desire to protect those who have been abused and abandoned by their leaders.

When I received a letter from a Shiite religious preacher from the United Kingdom, it did not surprise me. I receive many similar letters from extremist Muslims all over the world, as well as Western liberals, socialists, and others. Each time, opening these letters, I prepare for criticism of my careful scrutiny of my religion. As expected, the letter began with a familiar suggestion: “Stop criticizing your own religion.”

The letter went on to support this instruction with promises of the media and Western progressives favoring me and becoming far more supportive of me, if I were to align my views with their preferred talking points:

“If you stop criticizing Islam, the West will certainly be more welcoming of you, and you will receive more offers and opportunities to further your career.”

What is it that I say that rankles the left so much? I refuse to be apologetic for radical Islam in the West. I refuse to gloss over the darkest consequences to which rampant extremism has led. I do not waffle beneath the idea of multiculturalism or tolerance; some things are not meant to be tolerated. The message of the apologists is clear: Get in line. Send out the same messages that others are: about all aspects of Islam being a loving and benevolent religion. Focus on this and sweep the crimes against humanity under the carpet.

I truly wish I could.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Yellow Journalism of Bob Woodward and the New York Times By Ilana Mercer

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/16/yellow-journalism

It takes no time at all. You listen to Bob Woodward’s halting speech. You read his lumpen prose, and you get right away what undergirds his Trump-phobic tome, Fear: Trump in the White House.

Perhaps naively, the president had expected to fulfill his revolutionary campaign promises to American voters, an assumption that threw Woodward and the D.C. elites for a loop.

If past is prologue, voters don’t—and should not—get their way. After all, the views of Trump voters on American power are polar opposites of those held by the permanent state.

What does Boobus Americanus know? Nothing!

Woodward and the New York Times’ anonymous anti-Trump whistleblower consider the president to be stark raving bonkers for not grasping that Rome on the Potomac moves to its own beat. It does not respond to voters, except to mollify them with “bread and circuses.”

Mostly reflexively, not always consciously, “The Powers That Be” seek to retain and enlarge their sphere of influence. Nothing, not even the venerated vote, is allowed to alter that “balance.”

This means that established fiefdoms and the “thinking” underlying them are to remain unchanged and unchallenged. Foreign affairs, war-making, the post-war economic order and globally guided crony capitalism are examples.

Against this command-and-control apparatus, 62 million Americans rebelled. They liked Trump’s America First ideas enough to elect their champion as president.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Bob Newhart Peace Plan By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/oslo-accords-anniversary-israel-palestinian-conflict/

The Palestinians need to stop making war before their conflict with Israel can be resolved.

Jay Nordlinger likes to tell a story about “B-1 Bob” Dornan, the Republican congressman from California. He was a famously tough guy, an Air Force captain who survived two parachute bailouts in the Fifties and registered black voters in Mississippi in the Sixties. He said the hardest thing he ever did was quit smoking. But it’s the easiest thing in the world to do: You just stop it. Drinking, drugs, eating junk food — giving any of those up is a purely negative achievement. You just don’t do it anymore. Simple. “ Simple as a flower, and that’s a complicated thing.”

This week marks 25 years since the Rose Garden ceremony celebrating the signing of the Oslo Accords. You’ll remember the famous picture of a beaming President Bill Clinton kind of shoving PLO terrorist Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin toward each other to shake hands.

Like many of the purported victories of the Clinton administration, that moment of triumph has not aged very well. As Herb Keinon writes in the Jerusalem Post:

The longed-for peace still tarries, the New Middle East of Shimon Peres, one of the architects and leading proponent of the Oslo Accords, never emerged. In fact, some argue that the handshake 25 years ago did not improve the chances of peace between Arabs and Israelis, but actually — because it raised and then dashed hopes — pushed them farther away. A quarter-century since the formal kickoff of the Oslo process, peace between the two sides has rarely felt more distant.

A peace plan isn’t peace. Peace negotiations aren’t peace. Nobel Peace Prizes aren’t peace, either, though they were handed out after Oslo.

Peace is peace.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Islam and the Culling Foot-Bridge By Amil Imani

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/islam_and_the_culling_footbridge.html

Islam operates by two powerful schemes: reward and punishment. It mesmerizes the believer by its encyclopedic descriptions of Allah’s lush paradise that awaits the worthy faithful. For the kefir and a not-so-true Muslim, the destination is Allah’s dreadful hell.

Muslim clergy tirelessly preach about these two locations with great success. Fear of hell, for some, even out-muscles the attractions of paradise and works wonders in keeping the flock servile to the parasitic clergy.

A powerful, well honed scheme involves pol-e As-Sirāt (the footbridge of the path). The kefirs, after they die, do not even get a chance to see if they can cross this footbridge; they go directly to Allah’s hell. Yet all Muslims approach the footbridge. The problem is in crossing it. The preachers describe at great length how difficult it is to cross this bridge over the gorge of hell to the other side, where paradise is located.

A great majority of blindly faithful Muslims are either illiterate or semi-literate. These people tend to take everything the charlatan preachers say as literal truth; many panic with fear and beg the preachers to tell them what they need do to cross that dreadful footbridge. They become ripe for the picking. The preachers, well trained con artists that they are, burden these simpletons with all kinds of well rehearsed fabricated demands to keep the flock in their pen. The preachers say, for instance, that they must do this and they must do that to earn the good graces of Allah. And when they die, Allah will commission two angels to hold them on both sides and safely transport them over the bridge. Wayward Muslims, on the other hand, are all on their own and most likely will fall into the dreadful hell with their very first steps.

When asked about the mercy of Allah, since he is billed as the most merciful, can they count on his mercy to send them the helpful angel if they somehow, themselves, fail to live completely up to the standards of the faith? The preachers have a pet response to that, too. Allah’s mercy has limits. You had best not to count on it too much. He has already shown you his abundance of mercy by sending you his beloved messenger Muhammad. Allah guides, and it is your duty to follow. And if you are confused or in doubt about things, just go to the preachers. They will clarify things for you and set you on the straight path. The crafty preachers claim that they have spent their lives learning the intricacies of the faith, and it is their humble task to serve the believers.