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Watching Human Rights Watch The organization has long since ceased to have anything to do with human rights. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

Who still takes Human Rights Watch seriously? Well, I know the Guardian does, because it was that paper, the flagship of the British left, that alerted me the other day to the fact that HRW had issued its annual report. A quick search showed that the report had also made headlines in other major media, such as Newsweek and ABC News.

The report, of course, is nominally about human rights around the world. But it’s been a long time since HRW, founded in 1988, was really about human rights. For a long time now, it’s been hiring staffers with radical political backgrounds who are quick to berate Western democracies, especially the U.S. and Israel, while turning a blind eye to brutal Third World regimes, especially Islamic ones. Exemplary of HRW’s perverse perspective was its years-long campaign of defamation against British gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, who won its wrath by speaking up about the execution of gays in Iran.

The individual behind the slander of Tatchell was Scott Long, then director of HRW’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trangender rights program. Long didn’t just reprove Tatchell; to quote Tatchell, he “grossly misrepresented and denigrated my campaigns in defense of gay people persecuted by Iran and in opposition to Islamist fundamentalism.” In a breathtakingly unscrupulous 2009 essay, Long issued a series of flagrantly dishonest charges against Tatchell that Tatchell convincingly refuted, one by one, on his own website. Despite widespread criticism of Long for his savaging of a highly regarded gay-rights hero, HRW took five years to finally apologize to Tatchell and give Long the heave-ho.

In 2009, HRW suffered a major embarrassment. Robert L. Bernstein, its founder and longtime chairman, who had stepped down in 1998, wrote a New York Times op-ed reproving HRW for what it had turned into. HRW, he recalled, had been established “to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters.” Yes, he granted, “open, democratic societies have faults,” but they also have ways of fixing them. Closed societies don’t – which is why HRW’s founders “sought to draw a sharp line” between the two and “prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West.” But in the eleven years since his departure from HRW, lamented Bernstein, HRW had increasingly ignored this crucial open/closed distinction.

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The Obama Government’s Secret Societies Exposing the anti-Trump conspiracy within the DOJ. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

A week after the election, groups inside and outside the government, some calling themselves Obama Anonymous, had begun meeting to plan the “resistance” to Trump. Unlike the angry protesters in the streets, this resistance wasn’t a new organization. It consisted of Washington D.C. government lifers.

At the CFPB, there was a group calling itself Dumbledore’s Army. Within the FBI and the DOJ, there was a nameless “secret society”. Its details are being derived from text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok, a disgraced member of Mueller’s team, and his mistress, Lisa Page, who worked for FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Previous Strzok texts had spoken of taking out “insurance” against a Trump win. This was all the more significant since Strzok had investigated Hillary and interviewed Flynn. He was a crucial figure in both the investigations of Hillary Clinton and President Trump.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy revealed that the day after Trump won the election, texts between Strzok and Page suggested, “Perhaps this is the first meeting of the secret society.”

Like the CFPB’s Dumbldore’s Army, the reference may have been meant to make the conspiracy seem more lighthearted, but joking names for secret organizations within the government don’t make their dangerously subversive nature a laughing matter. Meanwhile many of the text messages from Strzok and Page have fallen victim to the same technical glitch that claimed Lois Lerner’s emails, Hillary’s emails and the video where Obama’s State Department spokeswoman admitted lying to the media about Iran.

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Tony Thomas Inky Wretches’ Inky Retches

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

According to members of the Fourth Estate, Donald Trump is a fascist or something close to it. As yet unreported is the charge that he roasts puppies over a slow fire, but given the media’s Trump Derangement Syndrome — a virus especially virulent at the ABC — it is only a question of time.

President Trump’s “fake news” awards last week inspire me to make some Trump Derangement Awards on our local scene. It was only last night (Jan 23), for starters, that the ABC’s $400,000-plus woman Leigh Sales on 7.30 was fawning over Michael Wolff, author of a hatchet-job book on Trump, Fire and Fury, purporting to be an inside account of the presidency. Sales’ questions were as soft as a week-old puppy’s tummy.

LEIGH SALES: What is Trump like in private? When staff attempt to brief him on issues that he needs to know about, what is he like in those moments?

For heaven’s sake, Ms Sales! The White House says Wolff never got one interview with President Trump. Wolff never claims he did. In a typical obfuscation, he says he has had three hours of conversation with Trump including during the election campaign.

And in terms of the ABC’s impartiality charter, how’s this for a smug, insulting question from Sales about the American President, our most powerful ally in a rapidly-shrinking free world?

LEIGH SALES: How did Trump’s advisers work out what policies he wants and what he wants to do?

It’s almost beyond belief, except that this is indeed the ABC. Trump is such a total moron, Sales suggests, that he’s just a puppet of nameless advisers. Trump himself, Sales imagines, has had nothing to do with turning the US into an energy superpower, driving home the biggest US tax cuts in 30 years, and sending the Dow Jones soaring 30% in the year to date.

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Can the First Amendment Protect Us from the Ruling Class? By Angelo Codevilla|

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

“Congress shall make no law” restricting the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, or of association. Aside from Christ’s distinction between duties to God and duties to Caesar, the First Amendment’s words are some of the greatest barriers ever erected against tyranny. But James Madison, who wrote them, warned how easily the ever-present temptation to tyrannize overcomes “parchment barriers.”

Until recently, the First Amendment was our Constitution’s least questioned, most treasured part. Today, growing calls for joining the rest of the world in criminalizing speech offensive to society’s most powerful groups remain anathema to most Americans. As the federal government applied the Bill of Rights to the states, the First Amendment was the first that it imposed upon them, in a 1925 Supreme Court decision called Gitlow v. New York. No one exercising government power at any level, no “state actor” may deprive anyone of his First Amendment rights. That’s how it works in theory, anyhow.

Nevertheless, most Americans sense that freedom to engage publicly in religious activity, to express ourselves, to choose with whom to associate (or not), is declining perhaps irreversibly. States, for example, have created “human rights commissions” that penalize businesses for refusing to take part in celebrating homosexuality. Public school employees are fired for praying on school grounds, and even children are punished for doing so. All know that certain opinions or attitudes, even casual remarks, deemed “offensive” by powerful persons preclude, derail, or end careers.

This re-prioritization naturally led to a re-defining of the First Amendment’s objective as ridding America of “discrimination” by private individuals. No one should be surprised that this change of focus, which initially led the courts to disallow laws permitting discrimination by private individuals against what came to be known as “protected classes,” ended in Justice Kennedy, writing for the Supreme Court’s majority, damning and well-nigh criminalizing the very motivations of such discrimination. How easily did “Congress shall make no law” become “Congress really must make a law…” !

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Lester Holt sides with Kim Jong-un, mass murderer By John Dietrich

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

Lester Holt’s travels in North Korea have given a favorable view of that dictatorship. This is unfortunate.

NBC’s Lester Holt traveled to North Korea in advance of the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea in order to inform the American public about the situation there. North Korea is possibly one of the most tragic examples of what 21st-century despotism is capable of. The Human Rights Watch World Report 2017 claimed, “North Korea remains one of the most repressive states in the world.”

Holt’s report can be described only as despicable. He follows a long line of Western reporters who have been willing tools of leftist dictators. They were and are accomplices in the mass murder of millions of people. Pulitzer Prize-winner Walter Duranty is perhaps the best example of this, as he tried to minimize the impact of Stalin’s policies in Ukraine. These policies led to the deaths of millions of people.

Holt reported from a Potemkin ski resort as apparently happy North Koreans were enjoying their time on the slopes. Holt also interviewed “people on the street.” To everyone’s surprise, they all mimicked the party line. Had he interviewed someone with suicidal tendencies who wanted to tell him the truth, the tape would never have gotten out of the North. Holt claimed, “It’s impossible to know what people on the street really think.”

Holt’s report covering the Olympics has the added benefit of attacking President Trump. It was an opportunity to portray North Korea in a favorable light while accusing the U.S. president of giving an adolescent response to the North Korean dictator’s threats.

In response to Kim Jung-un’s threat Trump tweeted, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times. Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” This “mine is bigger than yours” technique may sound undiplomatic, but it might just be a language Kim Jong-un understands.

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The Sinking of the FBI By William F. Marshall

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

J. Edgar Hoover must be turning in his grave at what is happening to his venerable FBI. Then again, given Hoover’s own proclivities to abuse his powers as the director of that agency, perhaps the predicament in which the bureau finds itself is a natural stage of evolution on an arc of governmental hubris.

It’s increasingly clear that the FBI is taking on water at an accelerating rate as new revelations come, fast and furious, in the political scandals engulfing Washington. This week, for example, we see two adolescent-minded senior FBI officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, involved in virtually all aspects of the Hillary Clinton email server investigation and the Donald Trump “Russian collusion” (or is it “obstruction of justice” now?) investigation, acting like hormone-fueled high school lovers, discussing a “secret society” of Trump-haters one day after President Trump’s remarkable election. We learned of this only because two patriotic congressmen, representatives Trey Gowdy and John Ratcliffe, former federal prosecutors both, revealed this stunning exchange to Fox News. Was the “secret society” a tongue-in-cheek reference? Given the mind-boggling behavior of the top echelons at the FBI and DOJ these days, one can’t be too sure.

The keel of the USS Federal Bureau of Investigation is starting to rise out of the water, like the RMS Titanic about 30 minutes after striking the iceberg. One can almost hear the bodies of top law enforcement bureaucrats crashing against each other, like so much china on a dying vessel sinking under the waves, as the embattled organization faces exposure after exposure of truly outrageous and un-American, if not illegal, conduct.

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Italian Leader Warns Muslim Migration Might Erase ‘Centuries of History’ By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

A political leader in Italy warned that the influx of migrants into the country might wipe away the country’s iconic and historic culture and society. Immigration has become a central issue in the national elections on March 4.

“We are under attack. Our culture, society, traditions, and way of life are at risk,” Northern League leader Matteo Salvini, an ally of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, declared in a statement last week.

Salvini defended the gist of controversial comments from Attilio Fontana, the League’s candidate to become the head of the Lombary region. “We have to decide if our ethnicity, if our white race, if our society continues to exist or if our society will be rubbed out,” Fontana told Radio Padania, Reuters reported.

After the comments unleashed a storm of controversy, Fontana admitted they had been a “lapse.” Salvini defended the gist of the comments, while down-playing the potentially racist angle.

“The color of one’s skin has nothing to do with it, but the risk is very real,” Salvini said. “Centuries of history risk disappearing if Islamization, which up until now has been underestimated, gains the upper hand.”

More than 600,000 migrants have come to Italy from across the Mediterranean Sea over the past four years. Last November, the Pew Research Center estimated that Muslims made up 4.8 percent of the population in 2016 — compared to 3.7 percent in 2010.

Pew presented three separate scenarios involving various levels of immigration. Even if Muslim migration levels dropped to zero, Italy’s Muslim population would still rise to 8.3 percent by 2050. Under a “medium migration” scenario, the number would rise to 12.4 percent. Even if the country experienced “high migration,” Muslims would still only make up 14.1 percent of the population in 2050, Pew reported.

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Pew Poll Makes It Official: Democrats Abandon Israel By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

President Donald Trump has proven himself a staunch defender of the State of Israel, officially recognizing Jerusalem as the state’s capital. Republicans are on board, but Democrats have distanced themselves from Israel in the past two years, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

Since 1978, more Americans have sympathized with Israel than with the Palestinians. In recent years, Republicans have backed Israel and Democrats have pulled away.

According to the Pew survey, 46 percent of Americans favor Israel, while 16 percent sympathize more with the Palestinians. A full 38 percent said they either sympathize with both (5 percent), neither (14 percent) or that they don’t know (19 percent). In 1978, 45 percent said they sympathized with Israel, 14 percent favored the Palestinians, and 42 percent could not decide.

A vast majority of Republicans (79 percent) said they sympathized more with Israel than with the Palestinians, an increase of 29 percentage points from 2001 (when 50 percent of Republicans preferred Israel).

Democrats shifted decisively away from Israel even more dramatically, however. In April 2016 — less than two years ago — 43 percent of Democrats said they sympathized more with Israel. This year, only 27 percent said so.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, liberal Democrats drove this change. In 2016, 33 percent of liberal Democrats sympathized with Israel, while 19 percent did so this year. Nearly twice as many liberal Democrats say they sympathize more with the Palestinians than Israel (35 percent to 19 percent).

Moderate and conservative Democrats still sympathize more with Israel (35 percent) than with the Palestinians (17 percent). Even so, fewer conservative and moderate Democrats sympathize with Israel today (35 percent) than in 2016 (53 percent).

Democrats didn’t reject Israel for the Palestinians, however. In fact, more Democrats sympathized with Palestine in 2016 (29 percent) than this year (25 percent). In 2016, only 16 percent of Democrats said they sympathized with both the Israelis and the Palestinians or neither of them.

Even in the past year, more Democrats said they sympathized with both or neither — and more said they just don’t know. In 2017, 19 percent chose both or neither, while this year 23 percent did so. Last year, 17 percent said they did not know which side they sympathized with, while 25 percent said so this year.

More Americans said President Trump is “striking the right balance” in the Middle East (42 percent) than those who said he favors Israel too much (30 percent). A quarter (25 percent) did not offer an opinion, while 3 percent said Trump favors the Palestinians too much (What are they smoking?).

At a similar point in Barack Obama’s presidency — April 2010 — 47 percent of Americans said he struck the proper balance, while 21 percent said he sided too much with the Palestinians, and 7 percent said Obama favored Israel too much. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The FBI’s Missing Texts More reasons to question the bureau’s 2016 election actions.

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

The Justice Department has dropped a second tranche of text exchanges between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page —conveniently delivering them to the Senate at the start of last Friday night’s government shutdown. Investigators are still plowing through the 384 pages, but preliminary findings raise new questions about FBI political maneuvering during the 2016 election.

Among the biggest news is what wasn’t in the Friday delivery: The FBI claims to have “failed” to capture text messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017. This period coincides with the height of the FBI’s investigation into possible Trump-Russia collusion, on which Mr. Strzok was a lead investigator. The FBI is blaming this five-month missing link on “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades.”

These are the folks tasked with investigating Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson on Saturday wrote to FBI director Christopher Wray asking how many other FBI records were lost. Imagine how Mr. Wray’s agents would treat a private individual’s failure to turn over comparable records.

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Pence Visits Israel’s Capital Multitudes of gentiles are also Zionists. That has no precedent in the Jews’ millennia-long history. By Meir Soloveichik

Posted By on January 24th, 2018

As I walked out of the Knesset following Vice President Mike Pence’s Monday afternoon address, an Israeli cameraman turned to me with a jovial expression. Speaking in Hebrew, he asked me about the man whose speech he had just heard: “Was that the messiah, or the vice president of the United States?” He was, perhaps, referring to the rapturous reception Mr. Pence had received from the Knesset members and the hundreds of spectators in the gallery. Yet the cameraman was also probably struck by how religious, and biblically based, the speech was. Mr. Pence threaded his remarks with references to Scripture, a rhetorical technique Knesset audiences have rarely heard from a political leader since Menachem Begin resigned as prime minister in 1983.

Mr. Pence’s address was one of the most Zionist speeches ever given by a non-Jew in the Knesset. The vice president is a devout evangelical Christian, and he said that in the birth of the modern state of Israel, we see nothing less than a fulfillment of the biblical promises of God. The speech was a milestone in American-Israeli relations, and a window into the heart of many American Christians who, like Mr. Pence, observe Israel’s emergence with wonder and reverence.

Drawing on the Book of Deuteronomy, Mr. Pence described how through “conquests and expulsions, inquisitions and pogroms,” and a Holocaust “that transformed the small faces of children into smoke under a silent sky,” the Jewish people nevertheless “held fast to a promise through all the ages, written so long ago, that ‘even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens,’ from there He would gather and bring you back to the land which your fathers possessed.”

Citing Isaiah, Mr. Pence suggested that in Israel’s 1948 founding “the Jewish people answered that ancient question: Can a country be born in a day, can a nation be born in a moment?” For Mr. Pence, the birth of modern Israel also reaffirmed the Jews’ covenantal bond to both the Holy Land and Jerusalem, where “Abraham offered his son Isaac, and was credited with righteousness for his faith in God,” and where “King David consecrated the capital of the Kingdom of Israel.” In the emergence of the modern Jewish state, Mr. Pence concluded, we see the hand of God: “The miracle of Israel is an inspiration to the world.”