FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Flattens ISIS Terror Complex The Mother of All Bombs takes out a terrorist stronghold. April 14, 2017 Matthew Vadum

Posted By on April 14th, 2017

The United States dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal yesterday on an Islamic State complex in the mountains of Afghanistan, a powerful indication that the Trump administration takes its responsibilities in the war against Muslim terrorism seriously.

This successful mission is part of President Trump making good on a campaign promise made in late 2015 to “bomb the shit out of” Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh). Yesterday the president referred to the military operation as “another successful job,” after acknowledging he trusted his generals in the field enough to delegate strike authority to them.

It is a welcome change after the Obama administration did little for years to combat Muslim terrorism and engaged in many activities that strengthened and emboldened terrorist groups. It also puts hostile regimes, like those in North Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Russia, and Syria on notice that America’s new president is dramatically different from his predecessor.

“This president understands that diplomacy without force behind it is nothing,” Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the Trump White House counterterrorism guru, said on “The O’Reilly Factor” last night.

“It’s words. It’s pieces of paper. Statecraft and leadership are when you use these things together to reinforce each other.”

Trump, unlike Obama, refuses to lead from behind and play friendlies off against each other, he said.

What we have seen is eight years of divisiveness, of the Obama White House dividing our nation against itself, and dividing us against our allies and friends. And in just 84 days, President Trump has replaced divisiveness with decisiveness, whether it’s to do with the border, whether it’s to do with manufacturing, whether it’s to do with NATO, or whether it’s to do with our enemies in ISIS, or in this case, the chemical weapons attack [in Syria] last week, we have changed the geopolitical reality in the world in just a matter of weeks.

President Trump is serious about confronting the terrorist threat, Gorka said.

People now understand just how much the president means what he says. When he says – unequivocally – in front of a joint session of Congress, at CPAC, when he says I am going to obliterate ISIS, literally, when he says, I am going to wipe the Islamic State off the face of the earth, it’s not empty rhetoric.

“It’s stunning” if you read the memoirs of Obama’s defense secretaries, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, Gorka said.

The former Pentagon chiefs tell of National Security Council meetings that last “three to four hours with nobody taking a decision,” he said. “That was the last eight years. That was the reality of the red lines. Along comes President Trump, that’s gone. We have a threat. We’ve promised to deal with and we’re dealing with it right now.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Drain the Higher Ed. Swamp That Produced the ‘Hang Trump’ Prof. Lunatic lecturer is only a symptom of a larger disease. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on April 14th, 2017

The uproar over a Fresno State history lecturer’s tweets about assassinating President Trump is understandable, but in the end the outrage is pointless. It’s doubtful the feds will charge the fellow, given how outlandish and obviously hyperbolic the tweets are. Nor is he likely to be fired. All the commotion has accomplished is to turn a nobody into a left-wing martyr persecuted for “speaking truth to power.”

The fact is, there is nothing this guy said that wouldn’t be applauded by most faculty in the social sciences and humanities, even if they don’t have his gumption to say so out loud. The politicized university is entering its fifth decade, and was already a done deal when Alan Bloom publicized it in his surprising 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. Thirty years later, focusing on the stupid statements of individual professors, or in this case lecturers, does nothing to get at the root of the problem. They are symptoms of deeper structural changes in the administrative apparatus of most colleges, and these changes in part have been responses to federal laws, particularly affirmative action, sexual harassment law, and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. With federal agency thugs backing campus leftists by threatening administrators with investigation or the reduction of federal funds, it has been easy to transform the university from a space for developing critical thinking and intellectual diversity, into a progressive propaganda organ and reeducation camp.

The most important of these government-backed instruments is “diversity.” This vacuous concept was created ex nihilo by Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in the 1979 Bakke vs. University of California decision as a way to protect admissions “set asides” for minorities without falling afoul of the law’s prohibition of quotas. Since only a “compelling state interest” could justify exceptions to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination by race, which naked quotas obviously did, “diversity,” along with all its alleged social and educational boons, was by judicial fiat deemed a “state interest.” In 2003, Grutter vs. Bollinger, and again in the two Fisher vs. University of Texas cases (2013, 2016), the Supreme Court confirmed Powell’s legerdemain in order “to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body,” as Republican-appointed Justice Sandra Day O’Conner said in the first Fisher case.

Of course, there exists no coherent definition of “diversity,” and no empirical evidence demonstrating its power to improve educational outcomes or create “educational benefits.” If there were such pedagogical benefits from diversity, we would have long ago dismantled the 107 historically black colleges and universities. On the contrary, there is much evidence that mismatching applicants to universities damages minority students and segregates campuses into identity-politics enclaves.

But using race to privilege some applicants over others wasn’t just about admitting students. The campus infrastructure had to change, which meant the expansion of politicized identity-politics programs, departments, general education courses, and student-support administrative offices and services. As a result, the cultural Marxism ideology that created identity politics in the first place now permeates the university far beyond the classroom, and enables an intolerance for competing ideas, not to mention shutting down the “free play of the mind on all subjects” that Matthew Arnold identified as the core mission of liberal education. And this corruption is encouraged by federal law and its leverage of federal money that flows into higher education.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Davies’s Emily Dickinson Film Is a Fine and Furious Work of Art But the Bulgarian Glory leaves viewers hopeless. By Armond White

Posted By on April 14th, 2017

Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion has an impossible heroine — the poet Emily Dickinson. With his signature concentration, gravity, and beauty, Davies tells her story of spinsterhood and genius in Amherst, Mass., where she lived around the time of the Civil War. The film is not simply a biopic; it’s also an emotional autobiography, as are all Davies’s films, from last year’s Sunset Song on to The Deep Blue Sea, Of Time and the City, The House of Mirth, The Neon Bible, his family chronicles Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, and his debut Trilogy, which depicted his struggle with Catholicism and sexuality.

As those titles indicate, Davies is a cinematic poet who rigorously challenges conventional storytelling with fixed compositions, bold camera moves, and sound design that mixes music and narration with stark, complex imagery: A transition scene of an open window, with curtains blowing, overlaps with the silhouette of a preacher whose sermon deeply moves Dickinson. In this, Dickinson’s longing is palpable, but the scene also expresses an agnosticism so candid and stubborn that it even includes metaphysical awe.

Though far different from this week’s action franchise The Fate of the Furious, A Quiet Passion could also have borne that movie’s title. Dickinson’s isolated intelligence and artistry are subjects unique to Davies’s filmmaking. A kind of creative fury — apparent in Davies’s radical formalism (and made vivid by actress Cynthia Nixon) — is what drives this movie.

Determined to show how Dickinson’s art was born out of both suffering and inspiration, Davies makes her an exasperating presence at school, at home with her family, and even for her admirers. The opening sequence of her resistance to the era’s Evangelism makes her a “no-hoper.” From this funny but pointed scene, Davies launches a bravura transition, borrowed from Michael Jackson’s revolutionary 1991 music video Black or White, in which Dickinson family portraits morph each character into adulthood.This age and time device is a miniature of the entire film’s powerful style. Every sequence — especially a montage showing reclusive Dickinson’s subconscious fantasy of desire (“up the stairs at midnight”) — attests to Davies’s fearless emphasis on Dickinson’s single-minded integrity. There is a tendency to make a martyr of Dickinson — “You have a soul anyone would be proud of,” says her sister Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle, whose luminous smile balances Nixon’s tight-faced bitterness). Sometimes Davies records Dickinson’s intransigence as though he is paying tribute to her proto-feminism. Yet Vinnie also warns her sister: “Integrity, if taken too far, can be ruthless.”

Davies always undercuts his own mandarin pride with a sense of humor, and A Quiet Passion features his wittiest exchanges yet.

Despite Davies’s dour approach, his artistry prevents him from indulging in self-pity. Like pop singer Morrissey, a fellow British Catholic manqué, Davies always undercuts his own mandarin pride with a sense of humor, and A Quiet Passion features his wittiest exchanges yet. In one scene, Dickinson welcomes her brother’s newborn child by improvising the famous “I’m Nobody / Who are you?” It’s like a moment from a biopic about a Hollywood pop composer, but the “Eureka” moment gives the audience a sense of discovery.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard Activists Say They’re So Sorry for Posting Fake Deportation Notices The students apparently thought posting the fake notices would be a good way to help people facing deportation. By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on April 14th, 2017

A group of activists at Harvard University have apologized for posting fake deportation notices in dorm rooms, explaining that they were simply trying to get people to think about how bad deportation is.

“We regret to inform you that a resident of this dorm has been detained indefinitely due to suspicious actions, suspected violent inclinations, or suspicion of being a deportable alien (i.e. questionable residency status),” the notice, which read “Harvard Special Investigations Unit” at the top, read.

The back — and only the back — of the flyer clarified that it was, in fact, “not a real notice,” and that the reason for the “unsettling nature” of it was to encourage “Harvard community members to reflect on the reality of people who face these kinds of unwarranted disruptions of life in unexplained suspicious circumstances before a state power that can hold ‘suspects’ indefinitely.” It also included information about an upcoming panel on incarceration. 



According to an article in the Harvard Crimson, the notice was signed by Harvard Concilio Latino, the Harvard Islamic Society, and the Harvard Black Students Association “and orchestrated by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee.” The Crimson reports that students from at least two of the groups — Concilio Latino and the Palestine Solidarity Committee — have already apologized.

In the apology statement from the Palestine Solidarity Committee, co-president Fatima M. Bishtawi explained that the purpose of posting those flyers was to make people think about the fact that people “do not always get to walk away from a notice knowing that it is fake.”

Bishtawi is right. Deportations and deportation notices are very, very real — but that’s exactly what made this whole stunt so disgusting. These activists say that they were trying to help people who may face deportation by getting others to think about what it must be like to face deportation, but apparently, they never stopped to think about the fact that making people who may face deportation think that they are at risk of being deported might not be the nicest way to help them.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Coptic Christians’ Endless Struggle for Survival in Egypt The Copts have been persecuted for thousands of years. ISIS’s brutal Palm Sunday bombing in Alexandria is just the latest episode. By Samuel Tadros

Posted By on April 14th, 2017

Viewed from the outside, there is nothing remarkable about Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Alexandria, where an Islamic State terrorist blew himself up during the Palm Sunday liturgy last weekend, leaving 17 people dead. The building is new, erected in 1952 and renovated several times since, but the site itself is much older — so old, in fact, that it can tell the story of the Coptic Church itself, in all its triumph and despair.

It was his first day in Alexandria and Saint Mark, the Evangelist, walked around the city bedazzled by its wonders. The small village that Alexander the Great had chosen to build into a city bearing his name had grown to equal Rome in its greatness. By night, as the strap of his sandal fell off, Mark stopped at the first shoemaker he found. While repairing the sandal, the shoemaker accidentally pierced his finger. “Heis ho Theos,” Anianus, the shoemaker, screamed. God is one. Mark took some mud from the ground, put it on the wound and miraculously healed Anianus’s hand. Mark began telling him how Jesus had died on the cross for mankind’s sins, preaching to him the message of Christ. The message fell on a welcoming heart. Anianus took Mark to his home and, with the rest of his family, converted. The Evangelist baptized them and, in due time, ordained Anianus as the city’s bishop.

Thus begins the story of Christianity in Egypt. Anianus’s house, in a district called Baucalis, became the first church in Egypt. While historians are unsure of the truth, according to Coptic tradition, this is the same site where Saint Mark’s Cathedral stands today. His mission would take him to other corners of the Roman world, but eventually he returned to Alexandria, and, in 68 a.d., shed his blood on its streets. Anianus followed Saint Mark onto the papal seat, starting a chain that continues to the present day with the 118th pope of Alexandria, Tawadros II, who was leading liturgy as the bombs exploded in Saint Mark’s last Sunday.

Even as Christianity spread across Egypt, Alexandria remained its spiritual center. In the small church in Baucalis, Coptic popes confronted waves of Roman persecution and preached to the faithful. If Christianity was to survive in Alexandria, home to the greatest library of late antiquity and a number of influential pagan philosophers, it would have to compete with Greek philosophy and defeat it. The Catechetical School of Alexandria emerged as Christianity’s greatest theological center, with men such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen defending the faith. The 17th Coptic pope, Peter, would be martyred at the same site in Baucalis.

By the end of the Roman persecution at the hands of Emperor Constantine the Great, Alexandria and its popes had emerged as one of the leading pillars of Christendom. The Church of Alexandria would soon discover that the end of persecution did not bring an end to its pains. Arius, a Libyan priest in the Baucalis church, touched off a controversy that would threaten to tear the whole Church apart by arguing that the Son was not equal to the Father. But if Alexandria gave birth to the greatest heresy threatening the Church, it also gave birth to the greatest defender of orthodoxy: Saint Athanasius. “The whole world is against you Athanasius,” a friend said to him. “Athanasius Contra Mundum,” he replied. I am against the world. The seat of Alexandria at Baucalis would soon discover how true his words were.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Sharia Councils and Sexual Abuse in Britain by Khadija Khan

Posted By on April 14th, 2017

As bad as this is, there is an even darker side to the story: Under Sharia Law, the second husband is under no obligation to give his wife a quick divorce – allowing him to keep her as his virtual sex slave for as long as he wishes.

If one asks how all of this jibes with British law, the answer is that it does not.

The UK-based NGO, Muslim Women’s Network, penned an open letter — with 100 signatories — to the British government and Home Affairs Select Committee demanding that the Sharia Council be investigated to determine whether its practices adhere to British law. In response, the Sharia Council declared the letter to be “Islamophobic” and accused the Muslim Women’s Network of being an anti-Muslim organization.

It is British law, not sharia, law that protects Muslim individuals and couples, as it does any other citizen. Contrary to what apologists for this travesty say, the plight of Muslim women should be treated as an issue of human rights.

The most recent scandal surrounding the sexual exploitation of Muslim women by Islamic religious leaders in the UK is yet further proof of the way in which Britain is turning a blind eye to horrific practices going on right under its nose.

A BBC investigation into “halala” — a ritual enabling a divorced Muslim woman to remarry her husband by first wedding someone else, consummating the union, and then being divorced by him — revealed that imams in Britain are not only encouraging this, but profiting financially from it. This depravity has led to many such women being held hostage, literally and figuratively, to men paid to become their second husbands.

This ritual, which is considered a misinterpretation of Islamic sharia law even by extremist Shi’ites and Saudi-style Salafists, is practiced by certain Islamic sects, such as Hanafis, Barelvis and Deobandis. When a husband repeats the Arabic word for divorce — talaq — three times to his wife, these sects consider a Muslim marriage null and void. For such a woman to be allowed to return to the husband who banished her, she must first marry someone else — and have sex with him — before the second husband divorces her.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Two Illinois Men Charged with Conspiring to Provide Material Support to ISIS By Debra Heine

Posted By on April 14th, 2017

Two Illinois men were arrested Wednesday on a federal complaint charging them with conspiring and attempting to provide material support to an associate joining ISIS on the battlefield in Syria. According to the complaint, the men had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, advocated for terrorism on social media, and even shared photos of themselves in terrorist get-ups holding the Islamic State flag at the Illinois Beach State Park in suburban Zion.

Joseph D. Jones and Edward Schimenti, both 35 and from Zion, were charged with “conspiring and attempting to provide material support and resources to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).” Jones is also known as “Yusuf Abdulhaqq” and Schimenti goes by the name of “Abdul Wali.”

According to the charges, the investigation began in September 2015, “when an undercover agent posing as a motorist arrested in a traffic-related incident approached Jones at the Zion Police Department, where Jones was being interviewed about the recent slaying of a friend.”

That agent introduced Jones and Schimenti to other undercover agents posing as ISIS supporters, including an informant whom they believed was planning to travel to the Middle East to join the Islamic State. Jones and Schimenti worked out with the purported jihadist at a Zion gym to help get him into combat shape. They also bought cell phones at a local store, thinking that they would be used as bomb detonators, according to the complaint. CONTINUE AT SITE

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

CIA Director Pompeo Rips ‘Hostile Intelligence Service’ WikiLeaks By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on April 14th, 2017

WASHINGTON — In his first public remarks since taking the helm of the Central Intelligence Agency, Director Mike Pompeo assured the American public that the CIA is not spying on them and tore into WikiLeaks as a morally bankrupt “non-state hostile intelligence service” that sides with global tyrants.

Speaking today at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Pompeo also implied that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would have sided with the Nazis during World War II.

Pompeo said he’s “surrounded by talented and committed patriots” in his new job at the agency, who “quietly go about their work and try not to get too worked up over the headlines, including the fanciful notion that they spy on their fellow citizens via microwave ovens” — a jab at White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway’s interpretation of WikiLeaks’ March data dump about CIA methods.

“But they are not at liberty to stand up to these false narratives and explain our mission to the American people,” he said of his workforce, adding “it is time to call these voices out — the men and women of CIA deserve a real defense.”

“…We are a foreign intelligence agency. We focus on collecting information about foreign governments, foreign terrorist organizations, and the like — not Americans. A number of specific rules keep us centered on that mission and protect the privacy of our fellow Americans. To take just one important example, CIA is legally prohibited from spying on people through electronic surveillance in the United States. We’re not tapping anyone’s phone in Wichita.”

Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman, added that “regardless of what you see on the silver screen, we do not pursue covert action on a whim without approval or accountability… there is oversight and accountability every step of the way.”

President Trump praised WikiLeaks repeatedly on the campaign trail as stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were published. Pompeo noted today that “we at CIA find the celebration of entities like WikiLeaks to be both perplexing and deeply troubling.”

“Because while we do our best to quietly collect information on those who pose very real threats to our country, individuals such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden seek to use that information to make a name for themselves. As long as they make a splash, they care nothing about the lives they put at risk or the damage they cause to national security,” he said. CONTINUE AT SITE

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Jihadi “Troubles”-Review of Troubled Dawn of the 21st Century: A Chronicle By Nidra Poller By Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin

Posted By on April 14th, 2017

The subtitle of Troubled Dawn of the 21st Century by Nidra Poller is revealing — “A Chronicle.” The word “chronicle” is generally defined as a “usually continuous historical account of events arranged in order of time without analysis or interpretation. Examples of such accounts date from Greek and Roman times, but the best-known chronicles were written or compiled in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. These were composed in prose or verse, and, in addition to providing valuable information about the period they covered [emphasis mine], they were used as sources by William Shakespeare and other playwrights.”[1] The word “chronicle” harbors its Greek root, which entered English through the Latin chronica, from Greek χρονικά, from χρόνος, chronos, “time”.

But when I read the subtitle, I associated to the Book of Chronicles in the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, called Divrei ha-Yamim in Hebrew literally translated “Divrei – devar/dabar words or deed yamim “of days” i.e. the words and actions of the past: chronicles, history, legends of the past. For the Hebrews it was not a day by day listing of acts and sayings, but a coherent, orderly, revelation of the Divine Word in practical events and ordinary speech” as my colleague and friend Prof. Norman Simms notes. Indeed Poller has written a modern day divrei ha-yamin concerning Islamic Terrorism, turning the jihadi chaos into something comprehensible that demands responsibility in countering.

Why might this be important and why is this a profound collection of writings? The fundamental objective of Islamic terrorism is to wreak chaos in terror in order to soften the targeted population for conquest and its submission. This book may be thought of as a roadmap for the violent ground that Poller and we as readers have been forced to travel since September 28-30 2000 to the Gaza withdrawal and beyond. Unlike a dry historical presentation of fact Poller plumbs such events, and presents these writings in a chronological order while revealing the profound powers of good and ill, raising all sorts of questions along the way as to how and why Israel and the Jews have been repeatedly maligned by journalistic prejudicial framing. Poller did not start out her writing career focusing on Islamic terrorism. She was involved in creative writing, a 1969 graduate of the prestigious John Hopkins Writing Program. The fascinating and serious trajectory, which she has forged for herself is breathtaking. Poller is not only an accomplished novelist, writer of children books but also the gifted translator of many and most especially of Emmanuel Levinas. Her work began to cross over into the challenging realm of terrorism as she could not remain passive and silent. I wondered for a moment if her translation of Michel Jeanneret’s Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne gives us a glimpse into Poller’s uncanny skill to detect and describe changes fluently because she does so with regard to terrorism’s chaos, violence and its never ending annihilation, particularly here in the Middle East. She herself notes that she gravitated toward terrorism as she sought to explain and describe the injustice and warped reality of Islamic terrorism. She understood intuitively its perverse reverse world: where good is bad and bad is good. In her Al Dura: Long Range Ballistic Myth (2004) Poller created and coined the invaluable and much needed term — the lethal narrative — narratives that incite and kill. The Al Dura hoax created a myth, which continues to incite Jew hatred leading to murder of Jews. Such narratives are part of the slippery slope to genocide. Troubled Dawn of the 21st Century lays out the background writings to her developing this important concept.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Marine Le Pen: France’s Very Own ‘Pinkwasher’? By Bruce Bawer

Posted By on April 14th, 2017

Israel is the only pro-gay country in the Middle East, and it’s not bigoted to say so.

In a 2011 New York Times op-ed, a radical socialist named Sarah Schulman rolled out a term that was almost certainly new to most Times readers: “pinkwashing.” Schulman, whose role as a longtime lesbian activist has earned her a position as “Distinguished Professor” at the City University of New York (despite having no academic degree beyond a B.A. from Empire State College), defined “pinkwashing” as “a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.”

Schulman’s point, as I’ve written previously, was that “gays and others should look past Israel’s gay-friendly image (which, she claimed, is the product of an intentional Israeli effort to bolster support abroad), focus on the terrible suffering of Palestinian Muslims at the merciless hands of the Israelis, and stop ‘constructing’ Muslims as gay-hating.”

The obscene fatuity of the concept of “pinkwashing” should be obvious: Israel is the only gay-friendly country in the Middle East; Islam teaches that gay people should be executed, and many of Israel’s Muslim neighborhoods take that injunction very seriously; any gay person who goes to the Palestinian territories and shouts his orientation from a rooftop should expect to be thrown off of that rooftop to his death.

I go into this backstory by way of introducing an April 7 article by Associated Press writer Thomas Adamson. The headline: “’Pinkwashing’ populism: Gay voters embrace French far-right.” One need not read past the headline to get Adamson’s point: support for Marine Le Pen, head of the right-wing Front National, is growing among gay Frenchmen, and Adamson views those gay Le Pen supporters with the same disdain that Schulman directs toward pro-Israeli gays.

Adamson kicks off his piece with this statement: “A political party that would abolish same-sex marriage — one whose founder wanted AIDS patients rounded up and branded homosexuality ‘a biological and social anomaly’ — is now winning LGBT votes in France.” It’s true that Le Pen promised in February to replace same-sex marriage, which became legal in France in 2013, with civil partnerships, and my own view is that this is unfortunate. If I were French, however, I’d still vote for the woman, because replacing same-sex marriage with civil partnerships is a hell of a lot better than replacing it with mass arrests, acts of torture, and executions. And if the French ship of state isn’t turned around tout de suite, that’s what’ll happen before too long. CONTINUE AT SITE