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‘Believe All Women’ at Your Peril By David Solway

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

We’ve heard it all before: “start by believing.” “Believe survivors.” At a recent panel discussion at the Ottawa City Hall, where my wife, Janice Fiamengo, was one of three featured participants, the subject of #MeToo and “Believe All Women” came up during the Q&A. (See 1:35:34 to 1:38:27 of the embedded YouTube video below.) An audience member claimed that it behooved us in most cases to give credence to women bringing forth their stories of sexual abuse. The young woman was skeptical of the court process as a way of resolving issues of sexual violence in women’s favor and contended that we need “non-criminal” forms of restorative justice, some form of “healing or accountability.”

Janice and her co-panelists, authors Paul Nathanson and David Shackleton, quickly put paid to that notion. Non-legal judgments via social media and public shaming could be as onerous and punitive as legal sentencing, turning men who had not been proven guilty into social lepers and bankrupts. The legal system may be flawed, but, as Shackleton remarked, it is the best we have and is theoretically capable of improvement.

In fact, an argument against #MeToo and the concomitant pursuit of non-legal incrimination is often put forward by the subtler variety of feminists, such as Josephine Mathias in the National Post and Bari Weiss in the New York Times, but for a completely different reason. They maintain that false allegations in the public sphere, such as the Duke Lacrosse and Rolling Stone moments, may discredit the “Believe All Women” movement; in the words of Weiss, such fictions “will tear down all accusers as false prophets.” It is not the harm to innocent men that concerns Weiss, but the damage to female credibility. The movement must be maintained.

Here I would indicate that, contrary to the young questioner who distrusted the cumbersome apparatus of the courts, which lead only to “re-victimization,” as well as Shackleton’s faith in a self-corrective justice system, court judgments in our SJW era tend to favor women – and when they don’t, the cry goes up for a quasi-legal system based on the “preponderance of evidence” rather than the “presumption of innocence” model – that is, on whatever narrative the judge or adjudicator tends to believe as more persuasive, evidence be damned. After all, women who lie or collude are only victims too troubled to get their stories straight.

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Offend ‘Diversity,’ Lose Your Job By Michael Walsh

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

The combination of academic social-justice Leftism and Islam is getting nastier by the day:

An Ohio music professor who said Muslim women and girls are safer in the U.S. than in any Middle Eastern country has been forced to retire. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports University of Cincinnati assistant professor Clifford Adams has been placed on administrative [leave] for the remainder of the semester and will retire May 1.

He made the comment online to a Muslim student who had criticized Donald Trump’s presidency and spoke about freedom and diversity. Adams wrote “how dare” she complain.

Adams didn’t respond immediately Friday to a request for comment. He earlier wrote a letter to The Enquirer saying he was “deeply sorry” and was trying to have a “lively, provocative, scholarly argument.” School spokesman Greg Vehr says the university is “committed to excellence and diversity.”

Excellence and diversity… right. Well, that’s certainly a funny way of showing a commitment to the former, at least. But “diversity,” now that’s a different story. Over the past 20 years or so, academic has been overwhelmed by the “diversity” fetish, which posits that a racially diverse student body is a desirable end in itself, rather than the byproduct (or not) of colorblind admissions procedures. The result is that “diversity” has become the single most important goal of the modern American university, with the educational standards and course offerings dumbed down accordingly.

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Anti-Hijab Protest in Iran Picking Up Steam Despite Arrests By Rick Moran

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

There is a growing movement among the women of Iran to defy authorities and remove their headscarves, or hijabs.

Women remove their hijabs in the street and attach them to poles, waving them like flags. Some post their defiant acts on social media.
Amy Mek @AmyMek
Iranian Police push woman off box who is protesting Hijab
While Brave Iranian women protest the sharia misogynist slave Hijab, western libs pretend Hijab is symbol of freedom & fashion.In Iran, to walk around without the Hijab could mean over a year in a prison with TORTURE!

In an interview with CBN News, Taleblu, explained what’s fueling the actions of these women.

“Young Iranian women are casting off their veils as a show of defiance against both the corrupt and discriminatory political and religious system in Iran,” he said.

He added, “This anti-Hijab movement is actually not new. It began in 1979, mere months after Khomeini returned to Iran and began Islamizing the country. Since 1979, Iranian women have found creative and brave ways to contest this policy of mandatory veiling. This is only the latest iteration of that push back.”

The ayatollahs are trying hard to control the Internet and access to outside news sources. But it appears they are fighting a losing battle:

Since December, more than 30 Iranian women have been arrested for publicly removing their scarves in defiance of the Islamic regime’s strict law.

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RACE BAITING REP. MAXINE WATERS,(D-CA-District 43)

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

Maxine Moore Waters represents California’s 43rd congressional district. She has been in Congress since 1991, and previously served the 35th and 29th districts. The anti-Israel Arab America Association loves her….. rsk
‘Please Welcome Demonized Maxine Waters,’ Says Waters at D.C. Event By Nicholas Ballasy

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/please-welcome-demonized-maxine-waters-says-waters-d-c-event/

WASHINGTON – Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said President Trump is not going to change and become “more presidential,” arguing that members of his administration “insincerely appeal” to minority communities.

“Those of us who stand up for the kinds of issues we’re dealing with today are often demonized, so please welcome demonized Maxine Waters,” she said at the start of her speech during the VOICES Coalition’s briefing on “The FCC’s War on the Poor” on Capitol Hill.

“Part of the FCC’s mission is to ensure that all Americans can access communication networks and to ensure that these networks offer diverse programming and are operated and owned by people from diverse backgrounds,” Waters said. “One of the main ways we can achieve these goals is through net neutrality, which guarantees a free and open Internet.”

Waters said she’s received “thousands of calls” from constituents who said they value net neutrality. The congresswoman said she supports efforts to overturn the FCC’s repeal of the Obama-era net neutrality rules.

“This administration is doing everything it can to roll back years of progress,” she argued. “This administration’s attack on net neutrality is yet another attack on communities of color and we just can’t stand for it.”CONTINUE AT SITE

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Holocaust remembrance law puts Poland on the wrong side of global Left No Polish family was left untouched by the Nazi death machine. As a result, when Poles hear the words “Polish death camps” or “Polish Holocaust” they bristle. By Matthew Tyrmand

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

As the global media has highlighted ad nauseam, Poland recently passed through the legislature a bill that seeks to criminalize the holding of the Polish state complicit for the German Nazi crimes of the Holocaust and the attendant German atrocities during WWII. Currently the bill is being looked at by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal after Polish President Andrzej Duda sent it for review to make sure it complies with the Polish Constitution.

This bill, known as “Ustawa IPN” (“Institute of National Remembrance Law”), was motivated by Poles’ desire to correct historical inaccuracies regarding Poland’s image and the purported role Poland played during this dark time in history. Poland suffered more than any other country during this period as the Nazi plan was to extinguish Polish-ness and Poland from the map in the hegemonic expansion of the Third Reich, in addition to their “Final Solution” vis a vis European Jewry.

Widely accepted estimates of loss of life in Poland suggest six million Poles perished – three million Jewish and three million non-Jewish Poles. No Polish family was left untouched by the Nazi death machine. As a result, when Poles hear the words “Polish death camps” or “Polish Holocaust” they bristle. Only in recent years did the international media formally change their style guides to strike “Polish death camps” from the press lexicon (and in a fitting display of how widespread this ignorance was, even such a supposedly liberal, sensitive, worldly, cosmopolitan, nuanced ivory-tower academic elite as Barack Obama used the term, referencing Auschwitz in a speech in 2012, to such widespread consternation that it served as a final straw on this issue).

Poland was literally the only country in Nazi-occupied Europe that never demonstrated any complicity with the fascist Nazi occupiers (we all remember the Vichy regime in France and the Quisling one in Norway, which were closer to the norm than the exception in continental Europe). Poland operated a government in exile in London, never had a single SS volunteer, and saw penalties for hiding Jews more severe than anywhere else (whole families, such as the Ulma family in Markowa, Poland, were executed for doing the right and honorable thing).

The government in exile made it a crime for Poles to give up Jews to the Nazis, under penalty of death, and the “Council to Aid Jews” (Zegota) was set up by the Polish resistance in 1942. Poland had more “Righteous Among the Nations” than any other nation according to Yad Vashem – which makes sense as Poland was ground zero for European Jewry for many centuries, which in turn is why Hitler’s Final Solution was so predicated on a network of death camps being built in Poland. To this day there are more stories of the hiding and saving of Jews by Poles in Poland being continually unearthed and honored.

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No New Special Counsel By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

Sessions should appoint a Justice Department prosecutor to investigate the investigators.

‘What’s good for the goose . . .” is more an understandable impulse than a useful rule of thumb in legal controversies, particularly legal controversies in which an error has been made.

The White House and congressional Republicans have watched in ire as the Trump administration has been tied in knots by the no-boundaries Mueller investigation. “Okay,” they’re thinking, “now, it’s payback time.” There appear to have been highly irregular investigative tactics used in probing the Trump campaign — particularly, but not exclusively, by the Obama administration. Why not, then, appoint another special counsel to squeeze the squeezers? Why not turn the tables?

It’s a bad idea.

Original Sin: A Prosecutor but No Crime
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made a foundational error in appointing Robert Mueller to be special counsel to investigate . . . well . . . um . . . come to think of it, that was the error: The investigation has no parameters, and thus no limitations.

Investigations conducted by prosecutors are supposed to be rooted in known crimes — or, at the very least, articulable suspicion that known crimes have occurred. Under the governing regulations, to justify the appointment of a special counsel, those crimes must form the basis for two salient findings: (1) that the Justice Department has a conflict of interest so severe that it cannot conduct the investigation in the normal manner, and (2) that it is necessary to appoint, from outside the Justice Department, a quasi-independent prosecutor. This special prosecutor is to be given a grant of investigative jurisdiction limited to the crimes that the Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate — and no other crimes, unless the special counsel explicitly requests, and the Justice Department grants, an expansion of jurisdiction. (See here, where I address Paul Manafort’s claim that his indictment violates regulations limiting special-counsel jurisdiction.)

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TRUMP ON TRIAL – OR KANGAROO COURT? MELANIE PHILLIPS

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

This evening, I attended a panel discussion at Jewish Book Week in London entitled “Trump on trial”. The three panel members were all distinguished writers who viscerally loathe US President Donald Trump. What follows is an account of highlights of this discussion which I provide without further comment.

The first panellist was historian Simon Schama, who immediately after Trump’s election called it a “cataclysmic moment” and said “democracy often brings fascists to power, it did in Germany in the 1930s”.

The second was Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland whose new thriller To Kill the President, written under the name Sam Bourne, imagines an assassination plot hatched against a volatile demagogue in the White House – who does things like tweet, lie and grab a female aide by her genitals – for fear that he intends to launch a nuclear attack.

The third was novelist Howard Jacobson, whose latest novel Pussy, written in a “fury of disbelief” about Trump’s election, is a “comic fairytale” about a man called Prince Fricassus who imagines himself to be the Roman Emperor Nero, fantasises about hookers, is idle, boastful, thin-skinned and egotistic and has no manners, curiosity, knowledge, idea or words in which to express them – and who may therefore be the very man to lead his country.

Noting that the panel contained no Trump defender, the chairman Jonny Geller asked the three to identify two good things or successes that Trump had achieved.

Schama replied that Trump was liquidating positive governance in America. He was appointing to critical government agencies people whose “only qualification” was they would destroy them. Thus for example Scott Pruitt, who was appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was “abolishing regulation on toxic chemicals”; Education Secretary Betsy de Vos “doesn’t believe in public education”. Trump was a “deeply disgusting, reprehensible, dangerously unbalanced individual. The only good thing he does is once in every four days he plays golf”.

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The House of Windsor and Those Expansionist Jews… by Gerald A. Honigman

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

The House of Windsor, with Prince William’s projected summer arrival, will make its first official visit to Israel since David Ben-Gurion proclaimed independence on May 14, 1948, a nice birthday present for my own arrival on Planet Earth on May 8th and, coincidentally, also the birthday of the American President who would fight his own State Department in recognizing the resurrected Jewish nation.

In good times and in bad, pre-and post-statehood Israel has been tied to Great Britain.

From the days of 19th and early 20th century British Christian Zionists culminating in Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour’s 1917 Declaration; to the separation of almost 80% of the original land envisioned by Balfour in the post-World War I 1920 Mandate of Palestine (all the land east of the Jordan River) in 1922, engineered by Colonial Secretary Churchill as a gift to Arab nationalism for Hashemite support for London’s war effort; to Lt. General Sir John Bagot Glubb’s British-led Transjordanian Arab Legion’s attack on a reborn Israel in 1948; to London’s White Papers limiting entrance of Jews fleeing for their lives from Nazi gas chambers; etc. and so forth, the Jews’ and the Brits’ histories have been closely intertwined.

Add to this the irony that right now, today, as London joins most others in the United Nations assailing Israel for refusing to return to its pre-’67 war existence as a 1949 armistice line-created, 9-15 mile wide sardine can of a state, it was Great Britain’s own Lord Caradon, the chief architect of the final draft of carefully-worded UNSC Resolution 242 after the ’67 fighting, who saw to it that Israel would not have to return to the status quo ante and withdraw to the ’49 lines. As corroborated by 242’s other architects, like Professor Eugene Rostow, Israel was to get real, more defensible, secure, and (wishful thinking) recognized borders instead.

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GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Brain bleed detection gets Europe approval. Israel’s Zebra Medical Vision has received EU regulatory approval (i.e. the CE mark) for its new algorithm capable of detecting Intracranial hemorrhages (brain bleeds) from uploaded CT or MRI Scans. http://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3733482,00.html

Glucose analyzer gets Europe approval. I reported previously (twice) about Israel’s DreaMed Diabetes monitors for analyzing the data from Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs). DreaMed has just received the CE mark from the European Union for its Advisor Pro product.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-smart-software-harnesses-flood-of-data-to-manage-diabetes-care/
https://www.youtube.com/embed/_eMkeq0lrFc?rel=0

Excellent results for new prostate cancer test. (TY Hazel) I reported previously (July 2016) that Israel’s Micromedic Technologies had good results in an 18-patient trial of its CellDetect prostate cancer diagnosis solution. Latest tests on 59 samples were 80% successful – far exceeding the 25% for existing PSI tests.
https://www.israel21c.org/israeli-breakthrough-in-noninvasive-prostate-cancer-test/

Lifestyle controls your microbiome. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have found from a study of over 1,000 Israelis that there is no genetic link to the good bacteria in your gut (microbiome). A person’s health (cholesterol, weight, blood glucose levels etc.) however, can be controlled by maintaining a healthy stomach.
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/genetics-or-lifestyle-what-it-shapes-our-microbiome

A diagnostic kit on a USB drive. The tech-transfer company of Ben-Gurion University, plus Israeli-founded, Singapore-based Biosensorix, are developing $5 disease diagnosis kits that connect to a smartphone via its USB port. Instead of sending samples for lab tests, medical staff can get immediate blood test results and decide on a course of action. https://www.israel21c.org/new-usb-like-diagnostic-kits-provide-faster-results/

Using AI to analyze biopsies. Israeli startup Nucleai is developing computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) to help overworked pathologists process and analyze biopsies for cancer quicker and more accurately. Nucleai founders have years of experience of computer vision gained during their IDF service.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-startup-aims-at-disease-diagnosis-helping-pathologists-process-biopsies/

UK-Israel fund to research aging process. The UK has launched a new £5m fund to promote scientific collaboration and research between Israel and the UK into the aging process. The Britain Israel Research and Academic Exchange (BIRAX) Aging fund will also promote research that into aging-related diseases.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/uk-sets-up-5m-fund-for-collaboration-with-israel-on-aging-process/

$20 million donation for nuclear medicine center. Russian Jewish billionaire Roman Abramovich has donated $20 million to Israel’s Sheba Medical Center to build a new medical center for nuclear medicine and research. Its cyclotron particle accelerator will use radioactive ion beams to pinpoint and kill cancer cells.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/chessed-and-tzedaka/billionaire-donates-20m-to-israels-sheba-hospital-for-nuclear-medicine-research-center/2018/03/03/

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What Is a “Refugee”? The Jews from Morocco versus the Palestinians from Israel by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on March 10th, 2018

The Arab exodus from Israel in 1948 was the direct result of a genocidal war declared against the newly established Jewish state by all of its Arab neighbors, including the Arabs of Israel… approximately 700,000 local Arabs were displaced.

Approximately the same number of Jews were displaced from their Arab homelands during this period. Nearly all of them could trace their heritage back thousands of years, well before the Muslims and Arabs became the dominant population. …The most significant difference is between how Israel dealt with the Jews who were displaced and how the Arab and Muslim word dealt with the Palestinians who had been displaced by a war they started. Israel integrated its brothers and sisters from the Arab and Muslim world. The Arab world put its Palestinian brothers and sisters in refugee camps, treating them as political pawns — and festering sores —in its persistent war against the Jewish state.

The time has come – indeed it is long overdue – for the world to stop treating these Palestinians as refugees. That status ended decades ago. The Jews who came to Israel from Morocco many years ago are no longer refugees. Neither are the relatives of the Palestinians who have lived outside of Israel for nearly three quarters of a century.

A visit to Morocco shows that the claim of Palestinians to a “right of return” has little historic, moral or legal basis.

Jews lived in Morocco for centuries before Islam came to Casablanca, Fez and Marrakesh. The Jews, along with the Berbers, were the backbone of the economy and culture. Now their historic presence can be seen primarily in the hundreds of Jewish cemeteries and abandoned synagogues that are omnipresent in cities and towns throughout the Maghreb.

I visited Maimonides’s home, now a restaurant. The great Jewish philosopher and medical doctor taught at a university in Fez. Other Jewish intellectuals helped shape the culture of North Africa, from Morocco to Algeria to Tunisia to Egypt. In these countries, Jews were always a minority but their presence was felt in every area of life.