NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Flynn: Fact, and Narrative By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on December 19th, 2018

The FBI did not treat Flynn fairly, but while the Bureau’s situational ethics leave much to be desired, its aggressive tactics did not violate the law.

So. . . it turns out Michael Flynn was not sentenced on Tuesday.

No sentence does not mean no drama. We were treated to the notoriously unscripted Judge Emmet Sullivan suggesting that Flynn might somehow be guilty of “treason.” Now, I’ll grant you, being an unregistered agent of a foreign power is not a good thing (there’s even a law against it). But it’s tough to fathom how a judge could spin such a thing into treason when (a) the foreign power, Turkey in this case, is a NATO ally (at least technically), (b) General Flynn was not a U.S. government official when he acted as Ankara’s agent, (c) the prosecutor did not think it was an important enough crime to charge against Flynn, (d) Flynn is a decorated 33-year combat veteran who has written a book detailing a strategy for defeating America’s actual enemies, and (e) the prosecutor, in fact, has proposed a sentence of no jail time for the process crime that was actually charged in the case.

After calling a brief time-out in the proceedings, a contrite Judge Sullivan returned to the bench and retracted his loopy treason comments. All in all, it was a disgraceful performance: Flynn’s is not a complicated case, yet Sullivan failed to have a grip on basic facts. Still, before postponing the former national-security adviser’s sentencing, Sullivan — however unwittingly — performed a useful service in deconstructing the competing Flynn narratives.

Narrative overwhelms fact in modern political discourse. Maybe this is a function of the information age and modern news programming: Information gushes at people like an open hydrant. They feel the need to process information thematically, if they are to process it at all. And the lines between fact-reporting and opinion-analysis have blurred.

In my weekend column, I contended that there are two narratives of the Flynn episode, and that neither is accurate. Flynn fans say he has been railroaded, that the case against him is entirely fabricated, and that he was extorted into pleading guilty in order to protect his family from further ruin. Flynn critics counter that he lied to the FBI, and that a longtime military officer and national-security pro who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency is well aware that it is a crime to lie to the FBI, case closed.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Where’s Tutu? By Bruce Bawer

Posted By on December 19th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/wheres-tutu/

Once upon a time, a large framed photograph of Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu hung on the wall of my living room in Manhattan. I wasn’t the one who put it there, but I never felt a moment’s inclination to take it down, either. As it happens, the person with whom I lived at the time worked for the Episcopal Church (ECUSA), which is a part of the Anglican Communion, and which is headquartered in New York City. At the time — and I assume this is still going on today — the ECUSA was pouring plenty of cash into the Anglican churches in Africa, and Tutu, who back then was a frequent visitor to New York and very chummy with the ECUSA honchos and with Episcopal clergy in the city, was an especially favored object of the ECUSA’s largesse.

In any event, my cohabitant idolized Tutu as a champion of peace, reconciliation, brotherhood, and human rights in the aftermath of apartheid. He even met Tutu once or twice, and after those encounters he was walking on air. He quite simply adored the man.

Of course, Tutu wasn’t the only big name associated with the end of apartheid. There was Nelson Mandela, who headed up the African National Congress, spent years in prison, and ended up President of South Africa. And there was Mandela’s predecessor as president, F.W. DeKlerk, who worked with Mandela to dismantle apartheid and eventually shared the Nobel Peace Prize with him in 1993. But before they won their Nobels, Tutu won his, in 1984, with the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee hailing his leading role in “the non-violent struggle for liberation” in his country, “a struggle in which black and white South Africans unite to bring their country out of conflict and crisis.” Tutu deserved the honor: this was a man who, respected by both black and white, was able to persuade South Africans of both races, through sheer nobility of spirit, to resist uncivilized impulses and take the high road.

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Tutu sounded a noble note:

Unless we work assiduously so that all of God’s children, our brothers and sisters, members of our one human family, all will enjoy basic human rights, the right to a fulfilled life, the right of movement, of work, the freedom to be fully human, with a humanity measured by nothing less than the humanity of Jesus Christ Himself, then we are on the road inexorably to self-destruction, we are not far from global suicide; and yet it could be so different.

When will we learn that human beings are of infinite value because they have been created in the image of God, and that it is a blasphemy to treat them as if they were less than this and to do so ultimately recoils on those who do this? In dehumanizing others, they are themselves dehumanized. Perhaps oppression dehumanizes the oppressor as much as, if not more than, the oppressed. They need each other to become truly free, to become human. We can be human only in fellowship, in community, in koinonia, in peace.

I hadn’t thought about Tutu for a long time, but he’s been on my mind lately because of the horrors that are currently underway in the Republic of South Africa. In March, that nation’s parliament voted overwhelmingly to confiscate farmland from whites without compensation. Mass appropriation of white-owned land by black marauders is already taking place on a wide scale. Families that helped build South Africa and that have tilled their acres for generations have now either had their property stolen already or are huddling in their boarded-up, fenced-in homes waiting for an armed mob to come take it from them. And the assailants aren’t stopping at mere thievery. They have committed acts of physical cruelty motivated purely by greed and race hatred.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anti-Semitic Nation of Islam Receives Federal Funds To Proselytize to Federal Inmates By Debra Heine

Posted By on December 19th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/anti-semitic-nation-of-islam-receives-federal-funds-to-proselytize-to-federal-inmates/

Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the U.S. government “to teach religious study programs for federal prison inmates,” the Washington Examiner reported in an exclusive Wednesday. Since 2008, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and Department of Justice leaders have given at least $350,000 to Farrakhan’s black nationalist group according to records obtained by the Examiner.

The Anti-Defamation League calls Farrakhan “the lead­ing anti-Semite in Amer­ica,” who for 30 years “has espoused and promoted anti-Semitism and racism” and “has repeatedly alleged that the Jewish people were responsible for the slave trade, as well as the 9/11 attacks.”

The black nationalist preaches that white people are “blue-eyed devils” and Jews are “the synagogue of Satan,” and once even called Adolf Hitler “a very great man” who “raised Germany up from nothing.”

Farrakhan has long preached to his followers that “a mother wheel” hovers over the Earth — “a heavily armed” spaceship of death that will “rain destruction upon white America, but save those who embrace the Nation of Islam.”

“White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through,” said Farrakhan during a “Savior’s Day” address in February of this year. More recently, Farrakhan traveled to Iran where he called America the “great Satan” and led “death to America” chants.

Ironically, Farrakhan has instructed his followers to not accept money from the U.S. government. Said Farrakhan in a Dec. 14, 2013 statement: “If they offer you anything, look carefully into it, lest the Nation will no longer be tied to the principles that the Hon. Elijah Muhammad desired for us: to make us an independent nation on some of this Earth that we can call our own.”

Despite the group’s stated beliefs and intentions, Nation of Islam leaders “have received at least $364,500 in contracts and awards from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Justice between fiscal 2008 and fiscal 2019,” according to the report:

The funding was designed to provide “Nation of Islam religious services,” “Nation of Islam spiritual guide services,” “Nation of Islam study services,” and other related programming led by the organization’s leaders, according to Bureau of Prison records. The Nation of Islam has been labeled a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. CONTINUE AT SITE

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinian sentenced to death for preventing murder of Israeli children VIDEO

Posted By on December 19th, 2018

https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-palestinian-sentenced-to-death-for-preventing-murder-of-israeli-children/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=push_notification&utm_campaign=PushCrew_notification_1545239958&pushcrew_powered=1

A Palestinian man describes the brutal torture he endured under the Palestinian Authority for preventing a terror attack against Israeli children.

He also discusses the virulent anti-Semitism in the PA and the humane treatment he received in an Israeli prison.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Biden’s Prominence Illustrates the Dems’ Weak Bench By Henry I. Miller

Posted By on December 19th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/18/bidens-prominence

James Freeman wrote a recent Wall Street Journal column about the “authenticity” problems facing possible 2020 Democratic presidential candidates Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Beto O’Rourke. But former Vice-President Joe Biden, the current frontrunner according to a CNN poll released earlier this month, arguably has even more formidable baggage.

In spite of his experience in politics and reputation as a hail-fellow-well-met, Biden is anything but presidential material. He has for decades seemed to be suffering from some sort of dementia or other cognitive disorder—which would not be surprising for someone who has had two neurosurgical operations for leaking cerebral aneurysms.

Biden in 1987 plagiarized part of a campaign speech from one by Neil Kinnock, leader of Britain’s Labour Party, even revising his own family history to conform to the speech. He also admitted to an earlier incident of plagiarism in law school.

Biden demonstrated either poor reality testing or merely a propensity for lying when he claimed that same year he “went to law school on a full academic scholarship—the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship,” and that he “ended up in the top half” of his class. He also said that in college, he was “the outstanding student in the political science department” and “graduated with three degrees.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Iran Threatens U.S. And Its Allies With “Drugs, Refugees, Bombs And Assassination” Congress, meanwhile, remains willfully blind. Michael Cutler

Posted By on December 19th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272287/iran-threatens-us-and-its-allies-drugs-refugees-michael-cutler

On December 9, 2018 The Hill, posted an article, that was short and to the point, “Iran: US sanctions will open doors to ‘drugs, refugees and bombs and assassination’ in west.”

The article focused on the remarks of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani made on December 8, 2018 at what was described as an “Anti-terrorism event” in Tehran. In his remarks Rouhani stated that if nations continued to adhere to the boycott against Iran that was reimposed by President Trump over the bogus Iranian nuclear deal that had been negotiated by the Obama administration, that Iran would not be able to continue its purported efforts to combat drug trafficking.

As reported in The Hill article:

“By making Iran weaker through sanctions, many people will not be safe. Those who do not believe what we say, they had better look at the map,” Rouhani added.

He said Iran spends millions each year against drug trafficking, “the results of which guarantees more health for people from Eastern Europe to Western America and from Northern Africa to Western Asia.”

“I warn all those who boycott, that if our abilities in fighting drugs and terrorism in their origins is undermined, you will not be able to survive the debris of drugs, refugees and bombs and assassination,” he added.

This brings us back to the nexus between U.S. border security and the threats posed to America and Americans by Latin America drug cartels that have been working in close cooperation with Hezbollah and Iranian Qods (Shock Troops) to move huge quantities of narcotics and aliens into the United States. Smuggling drugs and aliens provides huge profits and provides Iran with the opportunity to embed their sleeper agents among those aliens.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Anti-Israel Activist Arrested After Waving Machete Outside LA Synagogue Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 19th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/272284/anti-israel-activist-arrested-after-waving-machete-daniel-greenfield

You might think the guy waving a machete outside a Los Angeles synagogue while dressed like a Muslim terrorist is a Muslim terrorist.

But for once, you would be wrong.

He’s not a Muslim terrorist. Just a sympathizer who posts, “Long live Palestine” on Facebook.

A man who was taking selfies with a machete and making menacing gestures in front of a North Hollywood Chabad synagogue on Friday was arrested later that night, according to local media reports.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Inmate Information Center indicates that 49-year-old David Brener was arrested late Friday evening, and released Saturday afternoon on a $10,000 bond.

While Dave looked like he was auditioning for the ISIS calendar, he seems more likely the David Icke/Alice Walker type of bigot. But his obsession with Israel is pretty clear.

What is allegedly Brener’s Facebook page includes “Palestinian” imagery, claims that Israel committed genocide, “Love live Palestine”, praise for the Tamimis, calling Jews, “Zionazis”, and hashtags like, #palestineforever #zionazi #antizionism and #antizionist

Also Holocaust denial.

Most of his social feed seems to be rants about Israel and Jews. So this is none too surprising.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrat-Appointed Judge Lambastes Flynn The Washington swamp’s revenge ensues. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on December 19th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272289/democrat-appointed-judge-lambastes-flynn-matthew-vadum

A Democrat-appointed federal judge lashed out at former National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn Tuesday, suggesting the defendant was guilty of treason as he postponed the scheduled sentencing for three months.

Meanwhile, The Hill newspaper reports, the judge’s tirade came after two of Flynn’s Turkish associates were indicted:

The Department of Justice indicted Flynn’s two Turkish lobbying business associates on Monday for conspiracy and acting as foreign agents. The indictment spells out in sharp detail how Flynn was paid thousands of dollars to allegedly lobby for the Turkish government through a conduit while he was working for Trump.

Although federal prosecutors say Flynn committed ethical lapses they have long maintained they could not make a successful treason case against Flynn, but grandstanding Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, appointed in 1994 by President Clinton, suggested without evidence that they could have done so.

At a federal courthouse in the nation’s capital Dec. 18 Sullivan pressed prosecutors, asking if what Flynn did rose “to the level of treasonous activity” or if he could be prosecuted under the archaic Logan Act which forbids unauthorized U.S. persons from negotiating with foreign countries. Prosecutors present in the courtroom refused to answer. No one has ever been successfully prosecuted under the Logan Act, which was enacted in 1799.

Flynn has pled guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with the then- Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak during the transition period following the 2016 election and regarding the lobbying he conducted on behalf of Turkey while he worked on the Trump campaign and on the transition.

“I’m not hiding my disgust, my disdain for your criminal offense,” Sullivan told Flynn. “Arguably, you sold your country out. … In the White House! In the West Wing!”

“You were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security advisor to the president of the United States,” the judge said during his outburst.

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Can Trump be Europe’s Salvation? One Islam expert says yes. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on December 19th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272182/can-trump-be-europes-salvation-bruce-bawer

Islam: Europe Invaded, America Warned is a new English translation of a book that has sold 50,000 copies since appearing in Norwegian three years ago – a figure that, given Norway’s small population, is equivalent to over three million copies in the U.S. Its author, Hege Storhaug, who — full disclosure – is a longtime friend, former employer, and (frankly) heroine of mine, began her career as a left-wing feminist writing about the rights of women and girls and ended up becoming a supposedly right-wing critic of Islam because she recognized the Religion of Peace as, by far, the greatest threat to females in Norway.

Hege has now been fighting on the Islam front for a quarter-century. She’s advised members of the Norwegian parliament on the subject, handed them tons of material documenting the social and economic consequences of Muslim immigration, and made a number of specific proposals that have resulted in legislation (and, alas, many more proposals that have gone nowhere). Unsurprisingly, her work has made her enemies not only among the nation’s Muslims but also on the radical left, members of which, on New Year’s Eve 2006/7, broke into her Oslo home and beat her up. She now lives in a secret location outside the city, and since the Norwegian edition of her book came out she’s routinely been accompanied to her public events by a cohort of armed police officers. The cops didn’t even tell her beforehand that they’d decided to start guarding her: she found out about it on November 4, 2015, the day before her book’s official publication date, when she showed up at a small-town community center to deliver a lecture and found three – count ’em, three – police cars parked out front.

“I’m the first person in Norway ever to require such protection,” she told me when we spoke the other day. Of course it’s a sign of the times – a reflection of the very real menace that Islam now poses to its outspoken critics in this once placid land. Not surprisingly, the mainstream Norwegian media have kept mum about Hege’s unique security status. Entirely. A naïve observer might think they’d consider it big news that in Norway, in 2018, a writer – a writer! – needs to be followed around by uniformed men packing heat (this in a country where you hardly ever see a cop with a gun). You might also think the Norwegian media – which are notorious for their habit of debating to death the most niggling, nugatory issues you can imagine – would consider this grim sign of the erosion of free speech in Norway worth discussing. Nope. After all, if they reported on Hege’s police escorts, they’d have to acknowledge that Islam really is a threat – and that’s verboten.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Senate Passes Bipartisan Criminal-Justice-Reform Bill By Jack Crowe see note please

Posted By on December 19th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/senate-passes-bipartisan-criminal-justice-reform-bill/

It is a first tiny step but real reform must include bail reform- persons awaiting trial fill national jails because they cannot afford bail, and second…a good reform bill must address the problem of jailing mentally ill persons instead of providing supervised shelter elsewhere….rsk

The Senate on Tuesday passed the most significant criminal-justice-reform package in recent decades by an overwhelming and bipartisan margin.

The FIRST STEP Act, which passed the Senate 87-12, aims to reduce mass incarceration and high recidivism rates by expanding the pool of inmates eligible to participate in early-release programs and increasing judicial discretion with respect to sentencing.

Members of the House on both sides of the aisle have vowed to pass the legislative package this week and President Trump has publicly endorsed and pledged to sign it.

The legislation received endorsements from a wide array of political advocacy groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Koch brothers’ Right on Crime, and lawmakers from across the political spectrum.

Despite benefitting from broad bipartisan support, the legislation brought the intra-Republican divide over criminal justice into sharp relief, as hardliners led by senator Tom Cotton (Ark.) accused their fellow Republicans of jeopardizing the public safety by reducing the sentences of violent criminals and major drug traffickers.

Cotton and senator John Kennedy (R., La.) proposed a series of amendments to the bill that reduced the population of inmates eligible for early release, among other amendments, all of which were voted down by a narrow margin Tuesday night.