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The Choices Palestinians Make by Dexter Van Zile

Posted By on February 6th, 2017

The notion that the Israeli pilot is the only one who has any responsibility for the child’s death is simply false. A lot of bad choices were made — by Palestinians — prior to the death of the young child and Atef Abu Saif knows it; he just can’t — or will not — address these choices, at least not in this text.

The reality that Saif will not confront in his book [The Drone Eats With Me] is that Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip, bears a huge measure of responsibility for the suffering he documents. Hamas has repeatedly started wars that it cannot win against a country that cannot afford to lose.

During these conflicts, it has launched rockets from schoolyards and has used hospitals as command centers for its leaders, putting civilians on both sides of the conflict at risk. When children are killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza, Hamas puts their bodies on display to demonize Israel, and writers such as Saif assist in this tactic.

During the war in 2008–2009, Hamas… used cement and other building materials allowed into the Gaza Strip—ostensibly for the benefit of Palestinian civilians—in order to construct tunnels that could penetrate Israel and serve as a means to kidnap Israeli soldiers and civilians.

During its 2012 fight with Israel, Hamas leaders declared that killing Jews is a religious obligation. Hamas promotes a genocidal organization that seeks Israel’s destruction and yet Saif does not speak a word about this lethal ideology or actions before or during the 2014 war.

Honesty requires that the deaths of these Palestinian children serve to drive — not obstruct — the conversation toward Palestinian abilities and responsibility.

On and on he goes in an emotionally powerful but intellectually dishonest lament. Saif simply cannot come to grips with the responsibility Palestinian leaders have for the suffering in the areas they govern.

This is exactly what Saif’s condescending patrons and boosters in the West are looking for — narratives that allow them to embrace and broadcast baseless hatred for the Jewish state in the name of human rights.

Westerners who feast on this narrative do not help the Palestinians, but hurt them, by responding to the misdeeds of Palestinian elites with condescending pats on the head instead of the rebukes they warrant.

After returning from an awful weekend trip with a Christian youth group, I told my mother I wanted to stop going to church in the next town over and worship where we lived. “Nobody likes me over there,” I said. Her response was direct and brutal: “Maybe they are not the problem. Maybe it is you.”

It was a shock. Mothers are not supposed to talk that way to their 11-year-old sons (so I thought). In the years since, I have tried, with varying degrees of success, when in a difficult position, to look at the role I played in creating the circumstances I find myself in.

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France: Le Pen Launches Presidential Campaign “This election is a choice of civilization.” by Soeren Kern

Posted By on February 6th, 2017

“The question is simple and cruel: will our children live in a free, independent, democratic country?” — Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front party.

“Economic globalization, which rejects any limits, has weakened the immune system of the nation by dispossessing it of its constituent elements: borders, national currency, the authority of its laws in conducting economic affairs, and thus allowing another world to be born and grow: Islamic fundamentalism.” — Marine Le Pen.

“Islamic fundamentalism instrumentalizes the principle of religious freedom in an attempt to impose patterns of thought that are clearly the opposite of ours. We do not want to live under the yoke or threat of Islamic fundamentalism.” — Marine Le Pen.

“Globalism is based, as we see, on the negation of the values ​​on which France was built and on the principles in which the immense majority of French people still recognize themselves: the pre-eminence of the person and therefore its sacred character, individual freedom and therefore individual consent, national feeling and therefore national solidarity, equality of persons and therefore the refusal of situations of submission.” — Marine Le Pen.

“Those who come to France are to accept France, not to transform it to the image of their country of origin. If they want to live at home, they should have stayed at home.” — Marine Le Pen.

“In terms of terrorism, we do not intend to ask the French to get used to living with this horror. We will eradicate it here and abroad.” — Marine Le Pen.

“Everyone agrees that the European Union is a failure. It did not deliver on any of its promises, particularly on prosperity and security…. That is why, if elected, I will announce a referendum within six months on remaining or exiting the European Union…” — Marine Le Pen.

“The old left-right debates have outlived their usefulness…. This divide is no longer between the left and the right, but between patriots and globalists.” — Marine Le Pen.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the anti-establishment National Front party, has officially launched her campaign to become the next president of France.

Speaking at a rally attended by thousands of her supporters in Lyon on February 5, Le Pen launched a two-pronged attack on globalization and radical Islam. She promised French voters a referendum on remaining in the European Union, and also to deport Muslims who are deemed a security risk to France.

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RECAPPED: THE NEWS FROM THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS

Posted By on February 6th, 2017

This week we’ve seen the fallout from Trump’s immigration order, violence at U.C. Berkeley, and a contentious nomination process for Secretary of Education candidate Betsy DeVos. Here are this week’s stories and a few of our favorite articles:

1. Mayhem at Berkeley Hardens New Battle Lines on Free Speech Beth McMurtrie, Chronicle of Higher Education.
2. How State Lawmakers Can Restore Freedom on Campus Peter Berkowitz, Wall Street Journal.
3. What Trump’s Supreme Court Choice Might Mean for Higher Ed Eric Hoover, Chronicle of Higher Education.
4. On the Fence About DeVos Andrew Kreighbaum, Inside Higher Ed.
5. How Trump’s Immigration Order Is Affecting Higher Education Emily Deruy, The Atlantic.
6. A Call for ‘Confident Pluralism’ on Campuses Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed.
7. In Hillsdale College, a ‘Shining City on a Hill’ for ConservativesEric Eckholm, New York Times
8. Swastikas and Safety Pins: The Grim Heritage of Identity Politics R.J. Snell, Public Discourse.
9. Diversity for the Sake of Democracy Carrie Pritt, Quillette
10. Active Citizenship Should Be Learned out of School David Randall,Education Week.

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The Anti-Trump Media’s Attack on Monica Crowley The nation loses a skilled national security analyst over a CNN hit job. Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on February 6th, 2017

My friend Monica Crowley was the subject of a major hit job by CNN a few weeks back. She is a serious scholar, but she was portrayed as a serial plagiarist who never had an original idea in her head. The emotional toll of the uproar caused her to withdraw from her appointment by President Trump to be the senior director of communications at the National Security Council.

It is the country’s loss. Over the last two decades, Monica has been one of the most effective commentators on the national scene regarding the geopolitical challenges confronting the United States, and in particular the phenomenon of jihadist terror catalyzed by sharia-supremacist ideology — radical Islam. As much as anyone I’ve encountered, she has been invaluable: communicating the threats, debating them, and defending sensible national-security measures.

All writers make mistakes. But Monica’s have been blown wildly out of proportion, to the point of smear. The well-regarded copyright attorney Lynn Chu has done a careful study of the plagiarism allegations and posted her findings on Facebook. Two things leap out.

The first is context. Readers were presented with a series of passages in which Monica is shown to have relied on the work of other writers (including yours truly) in two of her most notable written works: a bestselling 2012 book called What the (Bleep) Just Happened?: The Happy Warrior’s Guide to the Great American Comeback, and her 17-year-old Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation, “Clearer than Truth”: Determining and Preserving Grand Strategy. The Evolution of American Policy Toward the People’s Republic of China Under Truman and Nixon. What was not well explained to readers is that the cited passages constitute a bare fraction of what Ms. Chu correctly describes as “long, heavily researched, synthetic work[s]” — 361 pages in the case of the book, 461 pages in the dissertation, both heavily footnoted.

Secondly, about those footnotes: According to Ms. Chu, CNN itemized 37 passages out of the 461 dissertation pages as improperly mined from the work of others without sourcing; but 26 of these items were “straightforwardly false” because, in order to make Monica look like a plagiarist, CNN omitted her footnotes. As Chu writes:

Ms. Crowley’s paraphrases were correctly sourced in her footnotes. But in most of these 26, CNN had omitted her footnote references. CNN hid from readers that her footnotes gave proper credit to the source. Readers were disabled from being allowed to see or infer that sources were in footnotes. It seemed to selectively delete footnote references (though some were left in) — perhaps so that readers would assume no visible reference mark meant no footnote existed.

If this happened, it is shameful.

With respect to the book, of the 61 passages mined out of the 361 pages, Chu found 57 of them to be “unwarranted accusations” of plagiarism, stacked to make matters look much worse than was actually the case. She elaborates:

The match often seemed computer-generated from shared proper names and generic phrases, or news and anecdotes repeated by aggregators and editorialists. This type of material is generally considered fair use and/or public domain. As a result, this CNN list was misleadingly long, possibly a calculated attempt to condemn her with manufactured, but false, bulk.

To be sure, Chu found passages that should have been sourced. From a legal standpoint, these were woefully insufficient — both in number and scope — to support an allegation of plagiarism. Of course, writers understandably want credit for their ideas, and for their words even if the ideas they are expressing are not unique; thus, they tend hold other writers to a higher standard than the law does — which is as it should be.

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The Seditious Left Prosecute the Berkeley rioters by enforcing federal law. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on February 6th, 2017

The violent uprising at UC Berkeley last week, sparked by Milo Yiannopoulos’s Freedom Center-sponsored speech on “sanctuary campuses,” could have been put down by authorities by enforcing existing federal law, but they didn’t act.

They let Berkeley burn.

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin (D) seemed to green-light the riots, employing the twisted leftist logic of the radicals who turned the campus into a war zone.

“Using speech to silence marginalized communities and promote bigotry is unacceptable,” he tweeted, in a reference to Yiannopoulos. “Hate speech isn’t welcome in our community.”

Hours into the rioting Wednesday no arrests had been made by the police. In all, only three arrests were made.

The Daily Californian, the Berkeley student newspaper, along with much of the media, downplayed the politically motivated violence. Of the three arrests, reporter Chantelle Lee wrote, “UCPD has arrested one suspect at the Milo Yiannopoulos protests Wednesday night and two suspects in an unrelated incident Thursday morning.”

She wrote that 19-year-old Edward Thomas Kuo, “who is not affiliated with the campus, was arrested Wednesday night on suspicion of remaining ‘in the place of a riot,’” according to a UCPD spokeswoman. “We had given a dispersal order,” the spokeswoman said. “He remained in the area and was blocking the path of the police, who were trying to move a skirmish line along.”

The “unrelated incident Thursday” Lee writes of wasn’t unrelated at all. Officers arrested Oakland resident Devonte Gaskin, 28, and San Francisco resident Sean Seuss, 27, when they were observed “assaulting two (individuals who) self-identified as Berkeley College Republicans, who were giving interviews to the media on Sproul Plaza.”

And whatever may the campus Republicans have been talking to the media about? Take a guess.

The rioting was all too predictable. Berkeley campus police gave the rioters permission to run amok by following a no-arrest policy, Yiannopoulos’s tour security coordinator Tej Gill told Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM satellite radio. “The police effectively did nothing, nothing while we were there,” he said.

Gill, a U.S. Navy SEAL, continued:

It just fuels the fire, the no arrest thing, hands off policy, every time they do this and they do it successfully with no arrest, no trouble, there’s no consequences and if there’s no consequences why stop? Each time they’re gonna get stronger and stronger.

Preventing riots isn’t hard, according to Gill.

It’s simple, enforce the law. That’s it. Just enforce the law. When we go to the conservative campuses the police departments there are amazing, the shows go off without a hitch, they’re orderly, they give the protesters room to protest and they give the Milo supporters room to support Milo then they keep everybody separated. Liberal campuses have effectively emasculated the police forces there. They’ve totally been politicized, they don’t let them do their job, they actually have a hands off and no arrests policy, one of the guys at Berkeley told me this.

Police are not powerless in the face of left-wing protesters hell-bent on destruction, but their political masters refuse to let them do their jobs.

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‘Putting Iran on Notice’ Means Restoring American Credibility Trump should tear up the nuclear agreement. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on February 6th, 2017

After declaring that “Iran is on notice” for a recent ballistic-missile test and for missile attacks against a Saudi ship by Houthi rebels, and then announcing new U.S. sanctions against Iran on Friday, the Trump administration met with predicable criticism from Democrats and the foreign-policy establishment, who objected that the president was provoking Iran and risking war by threatening the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA).

In fact, it was President Obama’s Iran policy that made the Middle East much less stable, as his appeasement of Iran and “leading from behind” approach emboldened Tehran and did little to stop it from pursuing nuclear weapons and building ballistic missiles to carry them. The Obama administration did absolutely nothing in response to Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism and its backing of the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Even worse, Obama officials during the nuclear talks gave Iran a green light to expand its role in Iraq and Syria. It’s no accident that Iran sent ground troops into Syria shortly after the JCPOA was announced.

The Obama administration claimed that the JCPOA would lead to an improvement in Iranian behavior and in U.S.–Iran relations. This did not happen. Iran has conducted at least a dozen ballistic-missile tests over the past two years. Some of these missiles had the words “Israel must be wiped off the map” written on the sides. Iran captured ten U.S. sailors and held them at gunpoint on the day of President Obama’s last State of the Union address. There has been a sharp increase in Iran’s harassing and threatening ships in the Persian Gulf, including U.S. Navy vessels. Houthi rebels, probably with Iranian assistance, fired anti-ship missiles at American and United Arab Emirates ships in the Red Sea last fall. Iran also has taken more American citizens and green-card holders prisoner since the JCPOA was announced and after five U.S. prisoners were released in January 2016.

Trump’s initial moves on Iran mark the beginning of an effort to reverse Obama’s disastrous Iran policy. The administration, actually addressing the threats Iran poses to global security, is holding Iran accountable for its actions and reasserting American power.

It’s no secret that no one believed President Obama when he said “all options are on the table,” drew red lines, or issued ultimatums after belligerent acts by Iran, North Korea, ISIS, the Syrian army, and Russia. The world knew that the use of American military power was never on the table for Obama and that his words were just empty rhetoric. They knew that Obama would never back up his red lines and ultimatums. While the Obama administration sometimes responded to rogue state actions with sanctions, they were usually weak and in every case ignored.

The Trump administration’s recent warning to Iran indicates that all options really are on the table when it comes to America’s responding to actions by rogue states and actors that endanger our security and the security of our friends and allies. The sanctions imposed today against 13 individuals and twelve companies involved in Iran’s missile program are long overdue and make clear that America will not look the other way while Tehran develops nuclear-weapons delivery systems.

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Trump’s Best Asset May Be His Unhinged Opponents Permanent outrage and hysterical doom-mongering do not attract moderate voters. By John Fund

Posted By on February 6th, 2017

The good news for Democrats is that the apathy of many of their voters — which contributed to Hillary Clinton’s losing in November — is gone now that Donald Trump is president.

“We have never in living memory seen an electorate as fired up and angry and engaged as they are right now, Ben Wikler, Washington director of the left-wing group Moveon.org, told RealClearPolitics.

The bad news for Democrats is that the fires of protest could burn so brightly that they alienate moderate voters and threaten any Democrats who decline to throw gasoline on the fires.

The anger of the liberal base is such that “a firestorm of criticism . . . awaits [Democratic lawmakers] when they don’t stand up to Trump,” Wikler says. As for primary challenges for Democrats who won’t confront Trump at every turn: “Everything is on the table.”

It certainly has been when it comes to the ceaseless efforts to delegitimize Trump. As soon as the election was over, state recounts were mounted, with the approval of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, angry demands were made that members of the Electoral College go against the results of their state votes and dump Trump, and wild charges were hurled that Russian hacking swung the election. FBI chief James Comey, an Obama appointee, was accused of tilting the election against Clinton, and blue-collar voters in the Midwest were smeared as “racists” who were easily manipulated by Trump.

Of course, missing in the progressive reaction to Trump’s victory was anything more than cursory mention of why the Left, during Obama’s eight years, had failed to fulfill promises of “hope and change,” address rising income inequality and middle-class stagnation, or win the respect of either America’s friends or adversaries.

A few Democrats have recently begun to question the party’s relentless choice of a negative, obstructionist tone. “I’d leave [Trump] out of the message and appeal to his base with a meaningful jobs plan,” Craig Crawford, an adviser to former Democratic senator Jim Webb of Virginia, told U.S. News and World Report, adding:

Don’t take his bait. Braying donkeys only make noise. Democrats should present a shadow government agenda that gives working-class Americans jobs and hope. Democrats should learn something from their futile efforts of the Reagan years, attacking the man instead of winning back his voter base with a positive message.

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Mapping $27 Billion In Federal Funding Of America’s Sanctuary Cities: Adam Andrzejewski ,

Posted By on February 6th, 2017

In the President Donald Trump-era, there could be a high-cost to running a sanctuary city…

On January 25, 2017, the President issued an Executive Order denying federal funding to sanctuary cities who choose not to comply with federal laws regarding deportation of illegal entrants.

Reaction to the new policy from across the political spectrum was immediate. However, the politicians, pundits and journalists admitted that the total amount of federal funding was undetermined.

Our organization, American Transparency (website: OpenTheBooks.com) was able to identify that number. We found nearly $27 billion ($26.74 billion to be exact) in federal funding (FY2016) for America’s 106 Sanctuary Cities. Our new report, “Federal Funding of America’s Sanctuary Cites” details federal grants and other forms of federal spending that flow to those cities.

Using our OpenTheBooks interactive map, search federal funding by city. Just click a pin and scroll down to review the municipal agencies and entities (FY2016). In fact, the map is quickly shareable to any website by copy/paste of the HTML code.

Across America, there are over 300 governmental jurisdictions claiming “sanctuary status.” Of those governments, there are 106 cities, while the rest are states, counties or other units of government.

Under Trump’s order, mayors defending their sanctuary city status are essentially imposing a defiance tax on local residents. On average, this tax amounts to $500 per man, woman and child. Major cities like Washington, D.C., New York and Chicago have the most to lose, and nearly $27 billion is at stake across the country.

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DNC Purges Black Candidate for Chairmanship for criticizing Islam’s Discrimination against Gays

Posted By on February 6th, 2017

Tolliver should have known from the outset that this would happen. It has long been established that in the hierarchy of politically correct causes, Islam trumps homosexuality. When AFDI ran ads highlighting the mistreatment of gays in Islamic law, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors issued a resolutioncondemning not that mistreatment, but our ads. Gay advocates such as Theresa Sparks and Chris Stedman attacked us for daring to call attention to the institutionalized mistreatment of gays under Islamic law.

Tolliver said of Ellison: “His being a Muslim is precisely why DNC voters should not vote for him. Muslims discriminate against gays. Islamic law is clear on the subject, and being gay is a direct violation of it. In some Muslim countries, being gay is a crime punishable by death.”

That is quite correct. But in response, instead of challenging Tolliver on the facts, which they couldn’t do in any case, the Democrats rallied around Ellison. Said interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile: “The Democratic Party welcomes all Americans from all backgrounds. What we do not welcome is people discriminating against others based on who they are or how they worship.”

So noting correctly that Islam discriminates against and persecutes gays is now “discriminating against others based on who they are or how they worship,” at least according to Donna Brazile (and, no doubt, many other enlightened Leftists). And Ellison’s spokesman, Brett Morrow, declared that it was “disappointing that a fellow DNC candidate would fan the flames of intolerance.” He didn’t say anything about Sharia states fanning the flames of intolerance against gays.

Morrow added: ““Keith has shown first-hand his commitment to our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, organizing tirelessly against the Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment in 2012.” That’s not the same thing as saying that he rejects Islam’s teaching that homosexuals should be put to death. Many Islamic groups supported same-sex marriage solely for tactical reasons: they knew it would open the door to the legalization of polygamy.

Meanwhile, it is interesting to note that The Hill, which is reporting here how the DNC has become Sharia-compliant and is prohibiting criticism of Islam, is itself also Sharia-compliant.

“DNC boots candidate from chairmanship race for criticizing Ellison’s Islamic faith,” by Jonathan Easley, The Hill, January 31, 2017:

The Democratic National Committee is kicking a candidate out of the chairmanship race after he told The Hill that Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) should not be the party’s next leader because he is a Muslim.

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Peter Smith :The Dumb Deal and a Presumptuous PM

Posted By on February 6th, 2017

The agreement to offload uninvited arrivals warehoused in Nauru and Manus was struck five days after the election by a lame duck president intent on saddling his successor with an intolerable obligation. Is it any wonder Trump reacted the way he did?
Perhaps there have been others but to my knowledge only Andrew Bolt nailed it. The dust-up is Malcolm Turnbull’s fault. Though, mind you, slippery Julie Bishop shouldn’t be let off the hook. This is a dumb deal, as President Trump so pithily put it.

Now let’s see. The United States agrees to admit 1250 so-called refugees stuck in Australia’s offshore detention centres in Nauru and Manus Island. We knew this was even more bizarre that Julia Gillard’s Malaysian deal when we first heard of it. It never passed the sniff test. Why in the world would the US ever agree to it? Ah! The US body politic did not agree to it. Barack Hussein Obama and his left-wing henchmen did. There’s the rub that Mr Turnbull should have appreciated from the very start.

Does anyone think that Hillary Clinton would have agreed to such a dumb deal if she’d been elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. Of course she wouldn’t. If elected in 2016, she would not have undone it or railed against it, but that is not the same thing.

This is hard for nearly all commentators. Put yourself in Trump’s position. He was elected on November 8 in large part because he promised to crackdown on illegal immigration and take resolute action to prevent Islamic terrorists from entering the US. While in the making for some time, the dumb deal was not finally concluded and signed off until November 13. Five days passed during which Mal and Julie should have thought about it. Signing that dumb deal was tantamount to spitting in the eye of Trump. The honourable and diplomatically proper procedure for Turnbull to have adopted would have been to sign the deal subject to its ratification by the President-elect when he took office.

Turnbull knew that he would be pilloried politically if the deal fell through. He knew his political capital was rock bottom. He calculated that it was better to embarrass the new president than it was to suffer more domestic political odium. He was too clever by half, but seems to have got away with it. Why? Because Trump is a political pariah who can do no right.

Perception is reality. And all of the MSM reportage and commentary that I have come across in Australia and in the US has the little guy being bullied by the big guy. Trump is the villain; as he was absolutely bound to be. Republican Senator McCain apologised to the Australian ambassador for Trump’s behaviour. What a lark, Turnbull must be thinking.

This is a verbatim taste of the Australian press’s Trump-berating emphasis: petulant Trump, tweeting like a juvenile, badgering and bragging, appearing to be unhinged, treating Australia like dirt, stamping his feet and screaming, completely clueless, a narcissistic buffoon. The last ad hominem attack came courtesy of a dug-up quote from the diplomatic ex-diplomat Kim Beazley.

Not being privy to this particular telephone conversation nor to any of the others between world leaders since the telephone was invented in 1876, I don’t know how far out of diplomatic bounds this one was. No Trump fan, Greg Sheridan seemed to take a grounded view. “Too much is being made of Trump’s leaked testy language [it was] the end of a long day and he was tired and terse.” That kind of balanced comment is going to get Sheridan drummed out of the press collective. He should have at least once included the descriptor buffoon.

Never mind the substance, what about the style? This pretty well sums up the MSM’s reaction to everything Trump does. It is plainly pathetic and common-sense people — those Deplorables — can see through it. In this case, Turnbull pulled a shifty on Trump. Trump knew it. Imagine how galling it must have been for him to be reminded by Turnbull that they were both businessmen and a deal is a deal. I am surprised that Trump didn’t use a string of expletives. President Nixon undoubtedly would have, and there would have gone his reputation down the toilet.

Let’s go back to why this deal was ever contemplated by President Obama. Who first suggested it? I just cannot believe it came from the Australian end, as desperate as the government is to empty detention centres. I mean, surely, this would not have entered Turnbull’s or Bishop’s wildest imaginings. It must have come out of Obama’s henchmen. Maybe I am paranoid but if these refugees had been Hindus, Buddhists, Jews or Seventh Day Adventists would this deal have ever entered Obama’s wildest imaginings? I think not. He just likes Muslim immigrants; their religion and their proclivity for voting left.