BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Real Resistance Lessons for America from gun control in Nazi-occupied France Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on June 18th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270491/real-resistance-lloyd-billingsley

Unlike Americans, Germans had no legal right to keep and bear arms and the liberal Weimar Republic sought to register, regulate and prohibit firearms. When Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party took power, they used those records to disarm and oppress the people, and that is why there was no armed resistance movement in Germany.

That is the story of Stephen Halbrook’s masterful 2013 Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State.” Halbrook’s new book, Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance, charts the same process in occupied France. As he notes, of the many books on the occupation, “not one focuses on the repression of gun owners.” So Halbrook, who earned his JD at Georgetown and taught political philosophy at George Mason University, wrote the first authoritative account.

Pierre Laval, prime minister in 1935, decreed the registration of firearms for the first time in modern French history. The registration was “aimed at firearms owners at large and did not focus on those responsible for fomenting political violence.” Halbrook shows how it worked in great detail but the main effect “was to enhance the power of government over the citizens.”

Little did anyone anticipate that “just five years later, France would be conquered by Nazi Germany,” and the author provides the back story to that as well.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

How to Talk to a Leftist Friend about Tommy Robinson Free speech and feminism are liberal values, aren’t they? Danusha V. Goska

Posted By on June 18th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270478/how-talk-leftist-friend-about-tommy-robinson-danusha-v-goska

A cozy wood fire burns in an open-face brick oven. Soft piano music floats through a smooth jazz repertoire of American standards. Porsches and Maseratis cruise past the window. Two women approach, embrace, and kiss each other’s cheeks.

RACHEL: Wanda, it’s been too long. Great to see you. You have to tell me all about your new book.

WANDA: Great to see you, too! I love your new glasses. And I want to hear all about your youngest. She just bought a condo with her fiancée, no? It seems like just yesterday they were playing with dolls.

WAITRESS: Have a look at our menu.

WANDA: Thank you. Listen, Rachel, you know me. Always obsessed with current events. I want to ask you to sign a petition requesting that British Prime Minister Theresa May free Tommy Robinson from prison.

RACHEL: So, what looks good? I think I’m going to try the arugula and pistachio pesto pie. You?

WANDA: Oh, I’ll just get the usual. I see you have your laptop with you. I can find the Tommy Robinson petition and you can sign right now.

RACHEL: Aren’t you going to tell me about your book? And don’t you want to hear about the condo?

WANDA: Of course, of course. But I thought we’d get this signature out of the way so we could relax and talk about fun things.

RACHEL: Sigh. So, who is Tommy Robinson? (Rachel opens her laptop and Googles “Tommy Robinson.”)

WANDA: Tommy Robinson is a human rights activist and a citizen journalist. He’s now a political prisoner, imprisoned for exercising his free speech. He’s a champion of victimized women. You care about women’s rights. You care about free speech. I know you do. I know you’d want to sign this petition.

RACHEL: Wanda, are you serious? Look at this. Is this the Tommy Robinson you are talking about? Nazi? White supremacist? Far-right extremist? Wanda, what gives? Why are you supporting this man? This is not like you.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘White Mythologies’ on a Campus Near You More leftist racial hate in academia. Jack Kerwick

Posted By on June 18th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270451/white-mythologies-campus-near-you-jack-kerwick

Traditionally, a classical liberal arts education had as its point and purpose the disinterested pursuit of truth and knowledge.

Yet most of today’s academics scoff at this mission as a “white mythology.”

The most recent example of this phenomenon comes from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, which offer the course, “White Mythologies: Objectivity, Meritocracy, and Other Social Constructions.”

The course is co-taught by a sociology professor, Kendralin Freeman, and anthropology professor, Jason Rodriguez. According to its description, the course “explores the history and ongoing manifestations of ‘white mythologies,’” which it characterizes as “long-standing, often implicit views about the place of White, male, Euro-American subjects as the norm.”

In fulfilling its objective, “White Mythologies” will also examine “how systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race.”

According to the watchdog organization, Campus Reform, Freeman and Rodriguez co-authored an article that featured in the journal, Whiteness and Education. In their essay, the two argue that “discourses” over the topics of “‘diversity’ and ‘intersectionality’ can undermine efforts to address racism [.]” Such “discourses” can also “protect white privilege” and “marginalize people of color.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The UN’s Collusion With Terrorists One-sided condemnations of Israel give ammunition to Hamas. Joseph Klein

Posted By on June 18th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270490/uns-collusion-terrorists-joseph-klein

At an emergency meeting held on June 13th, the United Nation General Assembly adopted another one-sided resolution against Israel. The resolution, proposed by Turkey and Algeria, deplored the use of allegedly excessive, disproportionate and indiscriminate force by Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including the Gaza Strip, which the resolution pretends is still “occupied” by Israel. The anti-Israel resolution demanded that Israel refrain from such actions and fully abide by its legal obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention relating to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949. It also requested the UN Secretary General to submit a report in no later than 60 days, outlining proposals on ways and means for ensuring the safety of Palestinian civilians, including on an international protection mechanism. The General Assembly resolution is virtually identical to Kuwait’s draft UN Security Council resolution that was vetoed by the United States on June 1st.

The General Assembly resolution, which was adopted by a vote of 120 in favor to 8 against with 45 abstentions, ignored Hamas’s acts of terrorism and provocations, including using children as human shields and its attempts to invade Israel during the protests at the Israeli-Gaza border in recent weeks demanding a so-called “right of return.” It ignored the fact that Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, which it uses as a base for its attacks against Israeli civilians, and that there have been no Israeli soldiers “occupying” Gaza since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005. The closest that the resolution came to acknowledge what Israeli civilians have had to put up with for years was deploring in general terms the firing of rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israeli civilian areas.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Deep State and Tyranny The deeper dangers that the FBI IG report reflects. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on June 18th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270488/deep-state-and-tyranny-bruce-thornton

The Department of Justice Inspector General’s Report released last week didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, but merely added more damning evidence for the corruption of the FBI and its investigations over the last few years. More worthy of comment, as Andy McCarthy writes, is its refusal to use common sense and note the obvious interconnections among the various bad actors, and the bond of political bias, seasoned with careerism and arrogance, that united them.

But the problems we are confronting reflect deeper dangers than the professional corruption of some functionaries of corrupt executive agencies armed with the coercive power of the state. The true moral of the story is the dangers to freedom of centralized and concentrated power––the very dangers consensual governments, including our own, were created to minimize.

The issue of political bias, which the IG report scanted, has to be understood in the larger nature of the large-scale bureaucratic public institutions that comprise the Deep State. In other words, the structure and functioning of the institution itself creates a bias that selects progressive employees. The bias insidiously becomes a second nature of which they often are no more conscious than a fish is that it’s wet.

Leftist ideology from Marxism to Progressivism is particularly useful for creating such self-serving agencies. American progressivism was founded on the conceit that “technopolitics,” the notion that modernity requires specialists and experts in the “human sciences” who can most efficiently manage the state. The old democratic and republican notion that virtue, practical experience, and common sense, none of which is dependent on university credentials, are adequate for citizens to govern no matter their wealth, lineage, or education.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The FBI Inspector General Report Directly Criticized President Obama By Dan McLaughlin

Posted By on June 18th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fbi-inspector-general-report-directly-criticized-president-obama/

On Thursday, the Justice Department inspector general released a sprawling 568-page report on the handling of the Hillary Clinton emails investigation in 2015-16 by the FBI and DOJ. There’s far too much in the report to detail here in one bite, as it covered (among other things):

The decision not to charge Secretary Clinton or anyone else for the mishandling of State Department emails, some containing classified information, by routing them through her now-infamous “homebrew” server (a decision that looks ever more reckless now that we have all focused more intently on the voracious email-hacking appetite of hostile powers such as Russia and China);
The also now-notorious tarmac meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, and the impact of Lynch’s refusal to recuse herself from the investigation;
The decisions by Jim Comey to make public statements in July and October 2016 in the midst of the election;
The ethical conflicts of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe (over his wife’s receipt of campaign donations from Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe), and McCabe’s role in slow-walking the followup investigation of Anthony Weiner’s laptop;
The ethical conflicts of Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik and his ties to John Podesta and the Clinton campaign;
Jim Comey’s own use of a Gmail account for official FBI business, as well as that of others at the FBI;
The affair between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page and their various text messages (some more related to the Russia investigation, which was outside the scope of the IG report) bashing Trump;
The ethical tangles of the FBI’s decision to allow Hillary Clinton to be represented at her interview by lawyers who were also key witnesses;
Pervasive FBI leaks and the receipt of various financial benefits by FBI agents from the media; and
An FBI Twitter document dump on the Clinton Foundation a week before the election.

Nobody comes out of this report looking good, and it is hard to blame voters who come away feeling vindicated in the view that that the entire class of elected officials, civil servants, and the press are a corrupt racket.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump the Bulldozer By John Fund

Posted By on June 18th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/president-trump-bulldozes-republican-leaders-should-not-force-loaylty/The President cows his critics, but he should be careful how much loyalty he demands.

Inside the Republican party, President Trump is riding high and his critics seem to be running scared. He enjoys sky-high approval ratings from voters who identify with the GOP, and his Republican critics are paying a price for crossing him.

On Tuesday, the day that voters went to the polls in South Carolina, Trump slammed GOP representative Mark Sanford and urged Republicans to vote for his rival in the congressional race in the state’s first district:

The tweet almost certainly played a role in Sanford’s defeat. Next month, Representative Martha Roby of Alabama faces a run-off at least in part because she criticized Trump two years ago during the 2016 campaign. Trump’s ire at Arizona senator Jeff Flake probably played a role in Flake’s plummeting poll numbers and his decision last year to retire after one term.

Sanford ruefully told NBC’s Meet the Press that while he supported the president’s legislative agenda about 90 percent of the time, it wasn’t enough for some primary voters who demanded personal loyalty to Trump. His defeat will make it harder for his congressional colleagues to call Trump out, he said, whether it’s on trade or on his twist-and-turn foreign policy. “From an electoral sense, people are running for cover because they don’t want to be on the losing side of a presidential tweet,” Sanford told host Chuck Todd. “And from a popular standpoint, it’s almost a Faustian bargain: I’ll pander to you if you pander to me.”

That mutual dependency has smoothed over a lot of rough spots in President Trump’s relationship with GOP lawmakers. But on Tuesday, Trump will meet with House Republicans in an effort to push for his immigration policy. Some worry that Trump will threaten to undermine those who oppose him.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Revolt Comes to Germany By Richard Fernandez

Posted By on June 18th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/the-revolt-comes-to-germany/

It has been said a nation can have either welfare or open borders — but not both — in the same way one can have a cool air-conditioned room in a blazing desert or an open door — but not both. It is the inequality between the outside and inside temperatures that the door is intended to preserve.

The problem of keeping the room cool while leaving the door open is now consuming Angela Merekel’s European Union as the refugee problem grows in political size. Can the EU have no internal borders if it lacks an external one? If there’s no way of keeping benefits in, what is the meaning of out?

That in a nutshell is the problem posed by the 21st century European migrant crisis where millions, mostly “from Muslim-majority countries of regions south and east of Europe, including Western Asia, South Asia and Africa,” have streamed into the continent. They predominantly enter through nations bordering on the Mediterranean and Turkey yet disproportionately settle in the Northern European high-wage areas of the continent. The resulting disruptions have fueled a succession of local rebellions from countries disproportionately affected by the inrushing tide. Each straining member country is demanding at least a partial return of control over their internal border in order to cope.

That revolt has finally reached Germany. The New York Times writes that “the populist surge that has left Hungary, Austria and Italy threatening to close their borders to migrants has now spread to Germany, where it could even bring down Chancellor Angela Merkel and further unhinge Europe Union’s cohesion and stability.”

The mutiny is led by her own interior minister, Horst Seehofer, a former Bavarian premier with a towering stature and plenty of beer-tent charisma, who sounds more in line with the nativist forces shaping politics in neighboring countries than with his own boss.

His region found itself on the front line of the refugee crisis in 2015, when Ms. Merkel opened the borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants who poured into Bavaria.

A similar story line was playing out in southern Europe, where Italy demanded an apology from French president Emmanuel Macron “for critical comments he made about Italian immigration policy”.

Macron said Rome had acted with “cynicism and irresponsibility” by closing its ports to a migrant ship earlier this week, setting off a bitter diplomatic spat between the two countries, with Italy’s new Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte considering putting off a meeting with Macron due on Friday.

“We’re waiting for an apology. If we get one, we can start down a new path,” Di Maio said in a radio interview. “There’s still time to take a step back, apologize, and then start over.” CONTINUE AT SITE

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Is Trump Pivoting East in Europe? By Alex Alexiev

Posted By on June 18th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/is_trump_pivoting_east_in_europe.html

As Trump haters are having yet another field day on account of his ostensible faux pas at the G-7 meeting in Canada, and leftist pundits fall over each other screaming that Trump has no strategic vision, as others just as self-assuredly accuse him of planning to “break the West,” which, on the face of it, requires plenty of strategic vision. While this silliness continues to rapidly declining effect, there are now signs that the White House is putting together a robust strategy in Europe that was missing until now.

It comes in the shape of A. Wess Mitchell, who was just appointed the point man at the State Department for Europe and Eurasia. The significance of this appointment, which was missed in the cacophony of anti-Trump perorations, was much on display at the very first programmatic speech he gave last week at the Heritage Foundation. Before delving into the speech, a couple of words about his background, which is important part of his appointment. Mitchell is a bona fide expert on Eastern Europe with three books to his credit and, more importantly, the long-term leader of CEPA (Center for European Policy Analysis), the only Washington think tank dedicated to the study of Eastern Europe.

Mitchell started his speech with a ringing endorsement of the Western alliance and the civilization undergirding it, which guaranteed “democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” But he also noted that the West collectively is “under-prepared” for its defense. There are a number of reasons for that, including the dismal legacy the Trump administration inherited from President Obama with its failed reset of relations with Russia, conflict in Ukraine, policy failure in Syria, and the largest ever Muslim migration to Europe.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A Troops for Nukes Trade? U.S. forces in South Korea do far more than protect Seoul.

Posted By on June 18th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-troops-for-nukes-trade-1529264016

President Trump sowed confusion in Asia last week when he called U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises “very provocative.” He suspended them until further notice and mused that he’d eventually like to bring all U.S. troops in Korea home. North Korea, Russia and China were pleased—American allies not so much.

“We will be stopping the war games which will save us a tremendous amount of money,” Mr. Trump said in Singapore, but which exercises does he mean? Vice President Mike Pence met with GOP Senators last week and suggested that Mr. Trump meant two annual combined exercises, the Ulchi Freedom Guardian in August and the Foal Eagle in late winter or early spring. But the Pentagon hasn’t confirmed that, and U.S. allies were caught off guard.

Mr. Pence’s spokeswoman later said regular training exercises and exchanges would continue, which is essential. The U.S. and South Koreans are constantly working to sharpen their skills in using weapons and responding to enemy tactics. This includes amphibious landings, parachute drops and responding to North Korean artillery. Stopping those drills would be military malpractice.

Canceling the two giant exercises will also reduce readiness, since they are timed to coincide with North Korea’s exercises and involve allied troops and U.S. forces from other theaters. Mr. Trump made the offer as a unilateral concession, but it’s notable that Kim Jong Un has offered no comparable military gesture. Returning three Americans his government took as hostages and promising to return veterans’ remains aren’t threat-reducing.

If Mr. Trump wants to remove provocations from the peninsula, how about asking Kim to pull North Korean forces back from the Demilitarized Zone and take Seoul out of artillery range? That would justify the exercise cancellation as a goodwill offer.

Beyond the exercises is Mr. Trump’s interest in using U.S. troops in South Korea as a negotiating tool in nuclear talks. U.S. forces working alongside a democratic ally aren’t the same as the illegal development of nuclear weapons by a state sponsor of terrorism.