U.N. Vote on Syria Fails as Russia Blocks Measure Veto in Security Council comes amid growing polarization over the country’s conflict By Farnaz Fassihi

UNITED NATIONS—The U.N. Security Council failed to bring about a resolution condemning the latest chemical attacks in Syria after Russia vetoed the measure, its eighth veto of proposed moves against Damascus since the conflict began six years ago.

The deadlock on Wednesday didn’t come as a surprise, as the Security Council has grown increasingly polarized over the conflict, leaving it unable to offer a feasible solution for ending it.

For the past eight days, since news of another chemical attack in Syria surfaced on April 4, the Council has struggled over a seemingly simple diplomatic task: to issue a resolution that condemns the general use of chemical weapons in Syria; call for U.N. investigations; and call on Damascus to offer full access to investigators.

The resolution went through three rewrites. At one point, three competing texts—one from U.S. and its allies, another from Russia and a third from the other 10 nonpermanent members of the Council—were circulated in a last-minute attempt to restore unity.

China abstained, declining to join Russia’s veto in a stand that drew praise in Washington from President Donald Trump. The U.S., together with France and the United Kingdom, and seven of their allies voted in favor. CONTINUE AT SITE

Notable & Quotable: Angry Clintons ‘Hillary’s talented and accomplished team of professionals and loyalists simply took it.’

From “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” a forthcoming book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, excerpted at TheHill.com, April 12:

Hillary Clinton turned her fury on her consultants and campaign aides, blaming them for a failure to focus the media on her platform.

In her ear the whole time, spurring her on to cast blame on others and never admit to anything, was her husband. Neither Clinton could accept the simple fact that Hillary had hamstrung her own campaign and dealt the most serious blow to her own presidential aspirations.

That state of denial would become more obvious than ever to her top aides and consultants during one conference call in the thick of the public discussion of her server. Joel Benenson, Mandy Grunwald, Jim Margolis, John Anzalone, John Podesta, [Robby] Mook, Huma Abedin and Dan Schwerin were among the small coterie who huddled in Abedin’s mostly bare corner office overlooking the East River at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters. Hillary and Bill, who rarely visited, joined them by phone.

Hillary’s severe, controlled voice crackled through the line first. It carried the sound of a disappointed teacher or mother delivering a lecture before a whipping. That back end was left to Bill, who lashed out with abandon. Eyes cast downward, stomachs turning—both from the scare tactics and from their own revulsion at being chastised for Hillary’s failures—Hillary’s talented and accomplished team of professionals and loyalists simply took it. There was no arguing with Bill Clinton.

The Trump Presidency Begins A presidency that was almost too much fun has taken a clear turn to the serious. Dan Henninger

Instead of “The Trump Presidency Begins,” an alternative headline for this column might have been “Trump’s Presidency Begins.” Each describes a different reality.

Until recently, “Trump’s presidency” has been about one thing—Donald Trump. It’s been Trump 24/7. Mr. Trump owned the presidency the way Mr. Trump owns a tower on Fifth Avenue. For better and for worse, Trump’s presidency was all about him.

In the past few weeks—the Gorsuch appointment, the Syrian strike, the meeting with China’s Xi Jinping —we are finally seeing the beginning of the real Trump presidency.

Like all the others dating back to George Washington, the presidency is not an object captured by one person; it is an office held in trust for the people of the United States.

The Trump-centric phenomenon of these early days is the product of our celebrity-centric times, not least the presidency. He drove it with social media, and the media torrents washed back over him.

There are some realities, though, that the media torrents haven’t washed away yet. America’s institutions, its politics and the distant world are still too large for anyone to hold and command alone. That is the lesson of recent days.

Neil Gorsuch was nominated by Mr. Trump to fill the ninth seat on the Supreme Court. What followed was a mighty political struggle. The opposition to Judge Gorsuch, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, revealed that the legal philosophies of progressives and conservatives have arrived at incompatibility.

Confirming Judge Gorsuch required the Trump presidency to recede so its political allies could rise and execute. The legislative branch eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, thereby preserving the president’s prerogatives.

While the Gorsuch drama played out on the Senate floor, Mr. Trump met at Mar-a-Lago with China’s Xi Jinping, who traveled nearly 8,000 miles to meet the American president. Possibly, the Chinese thought that Muhammad going to the mountain would flatter the flatterable Mr. Trump. Instead, the strikingly low-key meeting acknowledged the high stakes for the two nations and the world.

On Wednesday, Mr. Xi called the president to discuss North Korea again. That no doubt had something to do with Mr. Trump’s soufflé surprise over dinner with Mr. Xi—a missile strike against an Assad airfield and chemical-weapons depot in Syria.

Unlike the assassination of Osama bin Laden, when the mission details leaked out overnight, there was no self-congratulatory media dump out of the White House of this presumably ultra-media-conscious president. Just a blow to the Middle East status quo.

For our purposes, the important thing isn’t the strike but what came before. It requires little imagination to guess the import of the conversations about operational and political details between the president and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis —former head of the U.S.’s Middle Eastern Central Command—and his national security adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster. As Dorothy said to Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore. CONTINUE AT SITE

Which Way Will France Go? by Giulio Meotti

After two years and 238 deaths at the hands of Islamic terrorism, what did France do to defeat radical Islam? Almost nothing.

If Emmanuel Macron wins, France as we have known it can be considered pretty much over. By blaming “colonialism” for French troubles in the Arab world, and calling it “a crime against humanity”, he has effectively legitimized Muslim extremist violence against the French Republic.

In just two years, Muslim organizations in France have dragged to trial great writers such as Georges Bensoussan, Pascal Bruckner, and Renaud Camus. It is the Islamists’ dream coming true: seeing “Islamophobes” on trial to restrict their freedom of expression. Charlie Hebdo’s physical massacre was therefore followed by an intellectual one.

It was a sort of farewell to the army. During a brief visit to the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle last December, French President François Hollande honored the French soldiers involved in “Operation Chammal” against the Islamic State. After two years and 238 deaths at the hands of Islamic terrorism, what did France do to defeat radical Islam? Almost nothing.

It is this legacy of indifference that is at stake in the looming French presidential elections. If Marine Le Pen or François Fillon win, it means that France has rejected this autocratic legacy and wants to try a different, braver way. If Emmanuel Macron wins, France as we have known it can be considered pretty much over. Macron is, for example, against taking away French nationality from jihadists. Terrorism, Islam and security are almost absent from Macron’s vocabulary and platform, and he is in favor of lowering France’s state of emergency. By blaming “colonialism” for French troubles in the Arab world, and calling it “a crime against humanity”, he has effectively legitimized Muslim extremist violence against the French Republic.

As General Vincent Desportes wrote in his new book, La dernière Bataille de France (“The Last Battle of France”):

“President Hollande said on November 15 that it would be ruthless, we were at war … but we do not make war! History shows that in the eternal struggle between the shield and the sword, the sword is still a step forward and winning”.

Time to Tackle the Muslim Brotherhood by Jagdish N. Singh

The final report of the Senate’s “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” revealed that U.S.-stationed Saudi intelligence officers, who provided assistance to the hijackers ahead of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, were in direct contact with senior members of the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

During the Taliban regime in Kabul, the Brotherhood had training camps in Afghanistan for Kashmiri militants fighting against India and Central Asian states.

In his inaugural address on January 20, U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to “unite the civilized world against… and eradicate radical Islamic terrorism.” So far, however, the administration in Washington, like its predecessors, has done little to rein in one of the key sources of this growing global phenomenon — the Muslim Brotherhood.

Founded by Sheikh Hassan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood does not always openly advocate violence. But its main agenda is to establish a worldwide Islamic Caliphate by way of the sword. As its motto reads: “The Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; death for the sake of Allah is our wish.”The Brotherhood’s hostility towards the United States has been clear. It not only backed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but founded al Qaeda, nineteen of whose operatives perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.

The final report of the Senate’s “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” — released in December 2002 — revealed that U.S.-stationed Saudi intelligence officers, who provided assistance to the hijackers ahead of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, were in direct contact with senior members of the American branch of the Brotherhood.

Spicer’s Mistake and the Democrat’s Over-Reaction by Alan M. Dershowitz

Sean Spicer made a serious mistake when he compared Bashar Al-Assad to Hitler, and to make matters worse, he got his facts wrong. He quickly and fully apologized. There was no hint of anti-Semitism in his historical mistake and his apology should have ended the matter. But his political enemies decided to exploit his mistake by pandering to Jews. In doing so, it is they who are exploiting the memory of the six million during the Passover Holiday.

The Democratic National Committee issued a rebuke with the headline “We will not stand for anti-Semitism.” Its content included the following: “Denying the atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime is a tried and true tactic used by Neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups that have become emboldened since Donald Trump first announced his campaign for president.” By placing Hitler and Trump in the same sentence, the DNC committed a mistake similar to that for which they justly criticized Spicer. Moreover, the DNC itself, is co-chaired by a man who for many years did “stand for anti-Semitism” — namely Keith Ellison who stood by the notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, while denying that he was aware of Farrakhan’s very public Jew-hatred. It is the epitome of Chutzpah for the DNC to falsely accuse Spicer of standing by anti-Semitism while it is they who are co-chaired by a man who committed that sin.

Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority leaders, falsely accused Spicer of “downplaying the horror of the Holocaust.” But by leveling that false accusation, Pelosi herself is exploiting the tragedy.

Steven Goldstein, a hard-left radical who heads a phony organization that calls itself “The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect,” accused Spicer of “engage[ing] in Holocaust denial.” He called Spicer’s mistake a “most evil slur” against the Jewish people. Goldstein claims to speak for the Jewish people, but he represents only himself and a few handfuls of radical followers who are not in any way representative of the mainstream Jewish community. He repeatedly exploits the Holocaust in order to gain publicity for him and his tiny group of followers. Shame on them!

ON HOMELAND…WHO CAIRS?

‘Homeland’ Actor: The Real ‘Guilty Ones’ This Season Are White Men, Not Islamic Terrorists By M.G. Oprea

‘Homeland’ has taken such a sudden turn toward political preaching and progressive tut-tutting that its story and characters barely resemble those of the previous five seasons.

“Homeland’s” season six finale will air on Sunday night. If you’re like me, at this point you couldn’t care less. That’s because the show has taken such a sudden turn toward political preaching and progressive tut-tutting that its story and characters barely resemble those of the previous five seasons. If you’ve been wondering what on earth happened, wonder no more.

On Thursday, the actor who plays Saul Berenson, Mandy Patinkin, explained everything on NPR. In an interview with “Here & Now’s” Jeremy Hobson, Patinkin discusses past accusations that the show is Islamophobic. He says that although the “Homeland” crew never meant to be Islamophobic, and certainly didn’t expect that kind of criticism, it is nevertheless true. According to him, the show became “part of the problem of the Islamophobia.”

He goes on to explain that the whole point of this season was to stop being the problem and start “trying to be part of the cure,” something Patinkin feels they were “tremendously successful” in doing. Patinkin, who is active in assisting with the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece, added that the “guilty ones” are “certainly not the Muslim community, certainly not the refugees or the immigrants that have come here, but the white male membership of, even members of the intelligence community and other parts of our government.”

So, there it is. “Homeland’s” monumental shift in narrative and tone this season wasn’t an accident. It was a 100 percent intentional effort to atone for the show’s previous sins. But the self-flagellation is so heavy handed, and such a departure from previous seasons, that it’s jarring for the viewer. It’s also boring.

Political Correctness Is Boring

Part of what made the first five seasons of “Homeland” so entertaining is that they were unconstrained by political correctness. They were at liberty to craft the most compelling terrorism-espionage story they could dream up. The main characters, Carrie Mathison (played by Clare Danes) and Saul, were realists about the dangers of the world, about who’s an enemy and who’s a friend—even if they weren’t always right. But season six is an exercise in pure political correctness.

Carrie has become a civil rights activist. She has renounced her previous views about terrorism, most notably that Muslims are ever terrorists. The show implies that prior to this season, she had been a racist and is now trying to right those wrongs to atone for her past sins. (By the way, this suggests that you’re a racist, too, for enjoying those seasons.)

Not only is the young Muslim-American in the show, Sekou Bah, not a terrorist, the real conspiracy is run by the white male CIA agent, Dar Adal, who is trying to make it look like Sekou blew up a truck in New York City. With the help of Mossad, Dar is also trying to convince the new president-elect that Iran is breaking the nuclear deal, which of course they’re not. Oh, and in case you weren’t getting the message, one episode features Saul visiting his sister in a West Bank settlement, which affords him a pulpit from which to preach on the evils of Israeli settlements.

Politicization Destroys Art And Entertainment

ON HOMELAND…

Homeland: Uh-oh, Hillary lost! Now what?By Patricia McCarthy

The writers of Season 6 obviously were so confident Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president their new narrative had a female Democratic Party candidate win the election. Elizabeth Marvel is a wonderful actress and a pretty fair doppelganger for Hillary Clinton. But the writers got it all wrong. In an interview, show creator Alex Gansa revealed that their scripts were by design following real events but “five or six episodes had been completed when the election happened.” Hillary lost and they were stuck with the wrong real-life president-elect. M.G. Oprea wrote a terrific article at The Federalist about the ridiculous turnaround that has characterized this season. All those involved with the production have apparently come to feel sufficiently guilty about their realistic focus on Islamic radicalism and terrorism over the first five seasons that they have reversed course and become submissively pro-Islam. What was for five seasons a very fair representation of the worldwide problem of Islamic terrorism became a televised apologia for all the good work that came before.

Carrie Mathieson is now a pro-Muslim activist living in New York. She becomes close to the president-elect, then not close, then close again, then not. Dar Adal, who from the beginning of the series was sinister and menacing, is gradually but finally revealed to be the mastermind of an odious cabal subverting the president-elect with the help of others in the intelligence community and special ops military. Think Burt Lancaster in Seven Days in May or Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. (Adal even sees to it that Carrie’s daughter is taken from her by child protective services). He and his partners in crime plan to assassinate the new president. Why is never made clear, for nothing remotely disturbing is revealed about her until the last shot of the finale after she has justifiably had all those who plotted against her arrested. Then she then begins arresting even those who tried to protect her. Suddenly the people who have been running the CIA for years, the good guys who were trying to protect the country, set out to murder the president-elect! Did they construct the new direction after Donald Trump won? The latter must be true because the first woman president-elect, a Democrat, is by the finale somehow a female Donald Trump to be dealt with exactly in the manner the real left has been behaving since their loss to Trump in November. Total derangement. Consider all the leftists who have called for Trump’s assassination on Twitter and other social media, the chaotic protests, silly marches, etc.

The writers have inadvertently demonstrated exactly how the left functions, not the right. Now that we know the Obama administration functioned like a crime syndicate it is easy to surmise how easily they projected these tactics onto their own characters. They even created a character, (presumably based on radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones), who operates a massive bot organization to propagandize by social media. He is clearly meant to be a right-winger who, along with Adal, unfairly maligns the reputation of the president-elect’s dead soldier son. She is at this point a person for whom the viewer feels sympathy.

An Anti-Semitic Murder in a French No-Go Zone Colorful, vibrant, multicultural Muslim atrocities. Daniel Greenfield

Sarah Lucy Halimi was thrown out of the window of the third floor Paris apartment while she begged her Muslim killer to spare her life.

The 66-year-old director of an Orthodox Jewish nursery was woken from her sleep when she was violently beaten by her twenty something Muslim neighbor who then dragged her to the window.

She died on the street outside the building where she had lived for thirty years.

The killer had allegedly shouted, “Allahu Akbar”. In the tragic comedy of denial that every Islamic terrorism investigation inevitably becomes, the authorities are still hunting around for his motive.

The media claims that her Muslim killer, like every other Muslim terrorist in the past two years, was mentally unstable. According to official reports, he was incoherent. According to other accounts, he told the police that he had followed the commands of the Koran. He certainly would not have been the first.

The street where Sarah Lucy’s broken body lay was the Rue de Vaucouleurs. It’s close to Belleville, a neighborhood whose name means “Beautiful town”, but which is better known these days as one of France’s “Zones Urbaines Sensibles” or “Sensitive Urban Zones.”

Or, without the euphemisms, parts of the beautiful town are really a “No Go Zone”. Or, if you prefer the official descriptions, a vibrant, colorful and multicultural community full of delightfully exotic foods.

Two years ago, smirking media reporters had a field day visiting Belleville to show that FOX News reports about No Go Zones in France were nonsense. “Look, at the couscous restaurants and colorful scarves, there’s nothing to worry about.”

Unless your delightfully multicultural Muslim neighbor decides to shove you through a window while shouting one of his religion’s exotic genocidal epithets about the Jews and all infidels.

Belleville was once home to many Jews. Then Jews from North Africa fled there after Muslim takeovers deprived them of the civil rights they had briefly enjoyed under French rule. And their Mohammedan oppressors followed. Some years back, the JTA ran one of its cheerful Islamophilic pieces about Belleville. “In one Paris neighborhood, Jews and Muslims live as they did in North Africa.”

Metastasizing Academic Cancer Time for parents, donors and legislators to take action. Walter Williams

The average American has little knowledge of the extent to which our institutions of higher learning have been infected with a spreading cancer. One aspect of that cancer is akin to the loyalty oaths of the 1940s and ’50s. Professors were often required to sign statements that affirmed their loyalty to the United States government plus swear they were not members of any organizations, including the Communist Party USA, that sought the overthrow of the United States government. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down loyalty oaths as a condition of employment in 1964.

Today we’re seeing the re-emergence of the mentality that gave us loyalty oaths, in the form of mandating that faculty members write “diversity statements,” especially as part of hiring and promotion procedures. They are forced to pledge allegiance to the college’s diversity agenda. For example, the University of California, San Diego requires that one’s “Contributions to Diversity Statement” describe one’s “past experience, activities and future plans to advance diversity, equity and inclusion, in alignment with UC San Diego’s mission to reflect the diversity of California and to meet the educational needs and interests of its diverse population (http://tinyurl.com/mm6vzzq).” George Leef, director of research at The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, has written an article titled “Loyalty Oaths Return with Faculty ‘Diversity Statements'” (http://tinyurl.com/mxy363c). His article documents the growing trend of mandated faculty diversity statements — such as that at Virginia Tech, in which “candidates should include a list of activities that promote or contribute to inclusive teaching, research, outreach, and service.”

College diversity agendas are little more than a call for ideological conformity. Diversity only means racial, sex and sexual orientation quotas. In pursuit of this agenda, colleges spend billions of dollars on offices of diversity and inclusion, diversity classes, and diversity indoctrination. The last thing that diversity hustlers want is diversity in ideas. By the way, the next time you hear a college president boasting about how diverse his college is, ask him how many Republican faculty members there are in his journalism, psychology, English and sociology departments. In many cases, there is none, and in others, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans might be 20-to-1. Nearly 100 percent of political campaign contributions from liberal arts faculty go to Democrats. At Cornell University, for example, 97 percent of contributions from faculty went to Democrats. At Georgetown University, it was 96 percent.

A study by my George Mason University colleague Daniel B. Klein, along with Charlotta Stern, titled “Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Views of Social Scientists” (http://tinyurl.com/qxne3db), concluded: “The academic social sciences are pretty much a one-party system. Were the Democratic tent broad, the one-party system might have intellectual diversity. But the data show almost no diversity of opinion among the Democratic professors when it comes to the regulatory, redistributive state: they like it. Especially when it comes to the minimum wage, workplace-safety regulation, pharmaceutical regulation, environmental regulation, discrimination regulation, gun control, income redistribution, and public schooling.”

The fascist college trend that we are witnessing today is by no means new. As early as 1991, Yale University President Benno Schmidt warned: “The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.”