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Palestinian Christian Theologians against Israel by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on March 26th, 2018

The purpose here is not to condemn the church for what it believes. These beliefs, however, make it difficult to understand how the leaders of a church can advocate such intimate relations with Muslims, for whom everything Christians believe is pure blasphemy.

In the Qur’an, Jesus is regarded, not as God or the Son of God, but as a prophet inferior to Muhammad. The Qur’an is emphatic in saying that Jesus was not crucified, but that someone else was substituted for him. Therefore, Christ did not die to save mankind; this salvation is reserved only for those who believe in the God of the prophet Muhammad.

No one is suggesting that Palestinian Christians should invite their own deaths by outrightly defying the Muslim majority. It seems inexplicable, however, why these Christians prefer to join with the Islamic resistance rather than to remain silent, accept their supposedly inferior status, and refrain from overt endorsements of what Muslims view as right.

On March 3, Britain’s most senior Catholic cleric, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, called for closer ties with Islam on the grounds that “the two religions have more in common than people think”. What on Earth does this prelate think Muslims believe? After some 1400 years of rivalry and war, some sort of naivety and fuzzy thinking is making Christians the agents of their own destruction.

It is sad but possibly to be expected that many Palestinian Christians – who are constantly under threat but have not been killed or expelled – identify closely with the cause of their Muslim fellows as they engage in often violent “resistance” to Israel and the limited Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank (Judaea and Samaria). Christians may have a long history in Syria and Palestine, but the earliest Christians, including Christ, were, of course, Jews. According to Christianity Today:

The Acts of the Apostles states that the first Christians in Jerusalem were Jews, and historians believe that even after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Christianity in the Holy Land kept its Jewish flavor. But the Jewish revolt of Bar-Kokhba in 135 changed all this; Rome showed no mercy to the Jews and obliterated Jerusalem, renaming the city “Aelia Capitolina” and the country of Israel “Palestine.” With this blow, the Christian Jewish community effectively disappeared.

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“Supply and Demand” in Mass Migration A Conversation with former Czech President Václav Klaus by Grégoire Canlorbe

Posted By on March 26th, 2018

“Mass migration also has the effect of changing the objectives of migrants. The goal is no longer to assimilate to the new world, but to strengthen one’s old way of life… What is new with mass migration… often is the wish to extend one’s home world to one’s host country and to transform it gradually according to one’s own tradition.” — Václav Klaus, former President of the Czech Republic.

“As an economist, I always try to analyze a given situation in terms of supply and demand. The demand for mass migration does not come from the ordinary citizens, but from the European officials. The supply in mass migration, which comes from the migrants, exists only as a result of this policy intended to change the structure of the European society.” — Václav Klaus.

“I am convinced that the solution [for the Israel-Palestine conflict] could not come from abroad: not from the United Nations Security Council, or I do not know who else. It must be the result of negotiations… It was my job to manage the split [of Czechoslovakia] and I understood that it was necessary to negotiate, not to ratify the decision from Brussels or somewhere else.” — Václav Klaus.

Václav Klaus is a Czech economist and politician who served as the second President of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013. He also served as the second and last Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, federal subject of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, from July 1992 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in January 1993, and as the first Prime Minister of the newly-independent Czech Republic from 1993 to 1998. He is known for his euroscepticism, denial of man-caused global warming, opposition to mass immigration, and support of free market capitalism.

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Palestinians: Why Hamas Will Not Disarm by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on March 26th, 2018

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas wants to extend his authority to the Gaza Strip, while Hamas is seeking to take over the West Bank.

Abbas is fortunate to have Israel sitting with him in the West Bank. Otherwise, Hamas would have succeeded in its effort to topple his regime and “transfer” its weapons to the West Bank.

Meanwhile, Abbas will continue to dream of returning to the Gaza Strip, while Hamas will continue to prepare for war against Israel and removing the Palestinian Authority from power.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is living in an illusion if he thinks that his rivals in Hamas would ever agree to lay down their weapons or cede control over the Gaza Strip.

Hamas has no intention of dismantling its military and security apparatus. It also does not have any intention of allowing Abbas’s security forces to be stationed in the Gaza Strip. This refusal is why the “reconciliation” deal that Abbas signed with Hamas in Cairo in October 2017 will never be translated into facts on the ground.

Hamas is prepared to give Abbas anything he wants in the Gaza Strip except for security control. Hamas has no problem allowing Abbas and his government to function as a “civil administration” in the Gaza Strip by providing funds and various services to government institutions there.

If Abbas wants to pay salaries to civil servants in the Gaza Strip, that is fine with Hamas. If he wants to pay for fuel, water and electricity supplies to the Gaza Strip, that is also fine with Hamas.

Security control, however, is the last thing Hamas wants from Abbas. For Hamas, security is a red line not to be crossed.

What is behind Hamas’s fierce opposition to relinquishing security control over the Gaza Strip?

Hamas wants to retain its weapons and security control of the Gaza Strip for two reasons: first, it wants the weapons so that it can continue the “armed struggle” against Israel; second, Hamas knows that the moment it hands over security control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority (PA), many of its leaders and members will either be killed or imprisoned by Abbas’s security forces.

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David Martin Jones Utopian Ambitions Meet Big Data

Posted By on March 26th, 2018

Social media deliberately exploits human psychology, not least with its parade of endless distractions. As well as making us stupid and inattentive, political democracy also is undermined via the mining of big data, as the ongoing revelations of Facebook’s privacy violations attest.

The European Renaissance formed much of what became the West’s vocabulary concerning individual freedom, humanism, political order and the idea of scientific inquiry freed from religious supervision or customary oversight. It gave rise, amongst other things, to speculation about the possibility of perfection. Neo-Platonists, like Pico della Mirandola, considered what man’s release from a determinist chain of being might mean. “What a great miracle is man,” Pico wrote in 1487, “the intermediary between creatures … familiar with the gods above him, as he is lord of the creatures beneath him.”

In this optimistic spirit, later humanists, like Thomas More, imagined utopia, “no place”, where “there’s never any excuse for idleness”. More’s society of perfect happiness was also one of complete surveillance where “everyone has his eye on you”. In a similar vein, Francis Bacon conceived a New Atlantis where Salomon’s house, or the scientific College of the Six Days Work, would find out “the true nature of all things (whereby God might have the more glory in the workmanship of them, and men the more fruit in the use of them)”.

The scientific revolution and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment only reinforced this quest. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein captured the dream of science which also came to address the growing irrelevance of God. By the late nineteenth century both Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hardy speculated on the meaning of God’s death. As Hardy wondered:

And who or what shall fill His place?
Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes
For some fixed star to stimulate their pace
Towards the goal of their enterprise? …

In Silicon Valley, Big Tech offers the latest apocalyptic answer to Hardy’s question concerning “the goal of their enterprise”.

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Facebook denies it collects call and SMS data from phones without permission Catherine Shu

Posted By on March 26th, 2018

After an Ars Technica report that Facebook surreptitiously scrapes call and text message data from Android phones and has done so for years, the scandal-burdened company has responded that it only collects that information from users who have given permission.

Facebook’s public statement, posted on its press site, comes a couple of days after it took out full page newspaper ads to apologize for the misuse of data by third-party apps as it copes with fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal (follow the story as it develops here). In the ad, founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg wrote “We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”

The company’s response to the Ars Technica story, however, struck a different tone, with Facebook titling the post “Fact Check: Your Call and SMS History.” It said “You may have seen some recent reports that Facebook has been logging people’s call and SMS (text) history without their permission. This is not the case,” before going on to explain that call and text history logging is included with an opt-in feature on Messenger or Facebook Lite for Android that “people have to expressly agree to use” and that they can turn off at any time, which would also delete any call and text data shared with that app.

Ars Technica has already amended its original post with a response to Facebook’s statement, saying it contradicts several of its findings, including the experience of users who shared their data with the publication.

“In my case, a review of my Google Play data confirms that Messenger was never installed on the Android devices I used,” wrote Ars Technica IT and national security editor Sean Gallagher in the amendment to his post. “Facebook was installed on a Nexus tablet I used and on the Blackphone 2 in 2015, and there was never an explicit message requesting access to phone call and SMS data. Yet there is call data from the end of 2015 until late 2016, when I reinstalled the operating system on the Blackphone 2 and wiped all applications.”

In its statement, Facebook said “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with. This was first introduced in Messenger in 2015, and later offered as an option in Facebook Lite, a lightweight version of Facebook for Android .”

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Standing Up in France One hundred French intellectuals make a public declaration against Islamist totalitarianism. Ibn Warraq

Posted By on March 26th, 2018

On Friday, March 23, while he screamed “Allahu Akbar,” Redouan Lakdim killed three people in a supermarket in Southwestern France, where he had just taken hostages. First known to the police as a drug dealer, more recently Lakdim became known as a jihadi, an Islamic militant who proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS. He had demanded the release of Salah Abdeslam, the prime surviving suspect in the Islamic State attacks that killed 130 people in Paris in 2015. Yet he was allowed to circulate freely. Why?

All too often, the first reaction to such acts of Islamic terrorism is not horror at the barbaric acts and compassion for the victims, but an obsessive fear that “Islamophobia” will increase. In France, editorials in liberal outlets will once again warn against “conflation” (in French, the expression is “pas d’amalgam”), by which is meant that there should be no automatic identification of acts of terrorism with Islam. Islam is a religion of peace, we are instructed, and terrorists know nothing about true Islam. Liberal publications deny the evidence of the Koranic texts, Islamic principles, and the 1,400- year history of jihadi terrorism, which began with the Prophet Muhammad himself. They also ignore the writings of “modern” jihadists such as Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, which provide ample justification for holding Islam itself responsible for acts of terror.

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‘Never Again’? Omnibus Bill Is a Product of the Swamp By Roger Kimball

Posted By on March 26th, 2018

Thinking about the $1.3 trillion—that’s “trillion” with a “t” for “terrifying”—omnibus spending bill that President Trump signed on Friday, I wonder who is most unhappy about that incontinent, 2,232-page monument to congressional irresponsibility. (A small token of its irresponsibility—and its contempt for the public—was that the bill had to be signed a mere 17 hours after being passed by the Senate. “Otherwise”—cue the scary voice and Halloween music—“the government will shut down!” Is that a threat or a promise?)

There have been all sorts of lists of winners and losers. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that “We Democrats are really happy” with the bill, which will stuff enough cash into the bloated congressional gizzard to keep the government wheezing along through September. Many, nay most, on the other side of the D.C. gastrointestinal tract are not happy. “With Omnibus Signing,” as one representative headline put it, “Trump Formally Surrenders To The Swamp.”

I had myself, like other fiscally responsible Americans, hoped that President Trump would veto that bill, as he suggested he might as late as Friday morning. Still, it is well to keep in mind a fundamental truth that some canny tweeter put with pithy conciseness: “Regardless of how you feel about the #omnibus, it’s still a good day when you wake up and realize Hillary Clinton is not our president.”

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The Worst Law in America Congress can limit the damage of New York’s unjust Martin Act.

Posted By on March 26th, 2018

The competition is fierce for the worst law in America, but our pick goes to New York State’s notorious Martin Act. Now an effort is building in Congress that could curb its worst excesses and help the innocent.

Passed in 1921 to stop “boiler-room” stock-sale operations, the Martin Act lets prosecutors call almost anything fraud, and there’s no requirement to prove evil intent in civil cases. Yet proving scienter, or the intent or knowledge of wrongdoing, has been a staple requirement of British and American law for centuries lest innocent mistakes be prosecuted as intentional frauds. The Martin Act thus gives prosecutors a huge legal advantage against defendants, though for decades it was used sparingly.

That changed in the early 2000s when then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer wielded the Martin Act to bludgeon settlements out of big Wall Street firms without going to court. The law does particular damage because New York is America’s financial capital and nearly every company sooner or later does business there. Note how Mr. Spitzer’s equally unconstrained successor, Eric Schneiderman, is leveraging the Martin Act to investigate Exxon for purportedly misleading the public about climate change.

Prosecutors don’t want to give up this immense power, and legislators in New York have been loath to challenge them. But Congress has the power to act under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Legislation introduced last month by Rep. Tom MacArthur (R., N.J.) would address the problem by pre-empting state enforcement of civil securities fraud.

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The U.N. Hates Israel Why does the U.S. still belong to Turtle Bay’s Human Rights Council?

Posted By on March 26th, 2018

Syria bombs civilians with chlorine gas, China tortures dissidents, Venezuela restricts access to food and Burma is engaged in ethnic cleaning of a Muslim minority. So naturally the United Nations Human Rights Council trains the bulk of its outrage on . . . Israel.

On Friday the council approved five resolutions condemning Israel, as it has done every year since its creation in 2006. The 47-member council includes such paragons of political freedom as China and Cuba. The resolutions characterize Israel as an “occupying power” in Palestinian-claimed territories, including East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and denounce the Middle Eastern democracy as an abuser of human rights.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley and her team, at the urging of the British and the Dutch, spent months trying to convince other European countries not to single out Israel. But when the votes were tallied Friday, only the U.S. and Australia voted against all of the anti-Israel resolutions. The council passed only one resolution apiece condemning North Korean, Iranian and Syrian abuses.

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Are we suffering global cooling? By Martin Marcus

Posted By on March 26th, 2018

The east coast of the United States just endured a rare spring snowstorm. How could this happen when NASA is constantly announcing that we have record high temperatures?

Advocates of the global warming theory have been predicting rising temperatures since around 1983. Available data indicated no such trend, so these advocates found reasons to adjust past temperatures downward. People who remembered the 1930s as being the hottest decade of their lifetimes were ignored. If people witness spring snowstorms, should they be ignored, too?

Recent scientific work predicts that the sun’s output will diminish in our lifetimes. Valentina Zharkova et al, here and here, estimate that we will have an ice age from about 2020 to 2053.

The theory about ice ages is simple. Do you remember when your science teacher would rap two tuning forks against a table? They would make two tones plus a periodic lull, which your teacher called a beat. Zharkova believes that the sun has two resonances and they sometimes cause a beat. The last beat that we observed, the Maunder Minimum, was from 1645 to 1715. It accompanied a climatic episode known as the “Little Ice Age” (LIA).