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Because Nothing Says ‘I CAIR’ Like a Pardon By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on January 19th, 2017

Thinking about what else could happen in the next 48 hours?

The Investigative Project on Terrorism reports that CAIR (the Council on America-Islamic Relations) is leading a furious lobbying campaign by Islamists in the U.S. to persuade President Obama to free the five Hamas operatives convicted in the Holy Land Foundation case.

Isn’t that rich?

The HLF prosecution is the most significant terrorism financing case the Justice Department has ever done. Hamas, a designated terrorist organization under federal law, is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the HLFcase, the government proved not only that leading Islamist organizations in America were helping the Brotherhood transmit millions of dollars overseas to Hamas; prosecutors further demonstrated – using the Brotherhood’s own internal memoranda – that the Brotherhood saw its mission in the United States as “a grand jihad to eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within.”

In this grand jihad, the Brotherhood was in cahoots with these leading Islamist organizations, many of which had roots in the Brotherhood. One of these was … CAIR.

Indeed, Hamas and Brotherhood activists created CAIR in 1993-94 because they realized they needed an organization with legal know-how and media polish to advance the Islamist agenda. Having studied the United States (in a way that we resist studying radical Islam), they also realized that if they labeled their new creation a Muslim “civil rights” organization, the media would play along – CAIR would be lauded as a social justice warrior rather than revealed as a jihadist mouthpiece.

So CAIR was shown to be an unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF case. After the convictions of the five HLF officials in 2008, however, the incoming Obama administration opted against prosecuting CAIR and the other Islamist organizations that had assisted the conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization. In fact, early in his administration, Obama proclaimed his commitment “to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.”

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Environmentalists’ Fact-Free Case against Scott Pruitt Pruitt’s record is one of defending the environment and attempting to get the EPA to operate within the law. By David B. Rivkin Jr. & Andrew Grossman

Posted By on January 19th, 2017

Environmentalists know that they don’t like Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general whom President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. But they don’t seem to know exactly why, based on the fact-free attacks being lobbed in his direction. Could it be that they’re simply mistaken?

Sure, Pruitt’s led the movement of states resisting the Obama-era EPA’s overreaches and challenging them in court. (In full disclosure: He brought us in to represent Oklahoma in its challenge to EPA carbon-emission rules.) But his point in those cases has always been that the EPA has to live within the limits of the law, including the constitutional prohibition on the federal government from directing the states to do its bidding. So when the EPA overstepped the line, Pruitt took it to court. A desire to see the agency follow the law isn’t exactly disqualifying for an EPA administrator.

It also doesn’t say much about how Pruitt regards the environment. He’s on record as arguing that conservatives should recognize the important role of the EPA in addressing pollution that flows across state lines, which is a uniquely federal problem. But that, he’s said, should be the EPA’s focus. Echoing the Clean Air Act itself, Pruitt’s view is that most pollution is the primary responsibility of states and local governments. Only they can understand and act on the trade-offs involved in environmental protection and have the flexibility to take into account local needs, rather than impose one-size-fits-all nationwide rules.

On that score, Pruitt has practiced what he preached. When he entered office in 2011, one of the most serious environmental problems facing Oklahoma was poultry runoff, mostly from Arkansas farms, fouling the waters of the Illinois River and Lake Tenkiller in the eastern part of the state. Oklahoma had brought a federal lawsuit against 14 poultry producers in 2005, and it took nearly five years for the case to be teed up for a decision, in 2010.

After waiting two more years for the court to act, Pruitt decided to take matters into his own hands and negotiated a solution directly with Arkansas. The states commissioned Baylor University researchers to study Oklahoma’s water-quality standards and worked together to reduce runoff through increased waste treatment and disposing of poultry waste outside the river basin.

J. D. Strong, the former head of the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, specifically credits Pruitt with getting all the responsible parties “around the table” to make progress. During Pruitt’s tenure, Strong told Energy & Environment News, the state “made great strides when it comes to actual efforts to clean up scenic rivers in Oklahoma.”

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It’s No Revelation That Intelligence Agencies Are Politicized Trump is acknowledging a fact that recent history has repeatedly demonstrated. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 19th, 2017

Furor has arisen over President-elect Donald Trump’s charges that our intelligence agencies are politicized.

Spare us the outrage. For decades, directors of intelligence agencies have often quite inappropriately massaged their assessments to fit administration agendas.

Careerists at these agencies naturally want to continue working from one administration to the next in “the king is dead; long live the king!” style. So they make the necessary political adjustments, which are sometimes quite at odds with their own agency’s findings and to the detriment of national security. The result is often confusion — and misinformation passed off as authoritative intelligence.

After Barack Obama won the 2008 election, George W. Bush intelligence adviser John Brennan stayed on as Obama’s homeland-security adviser. He is currently the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Under Obama, Brennan loudly criticized the use of enhanced interrogation techniques under the Bush administration. Brennan praised his new boss for his superior approach to combating terrorism.

Brennan, who had served a year as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Bush, later assured the nation that enhanced interrogation techniques had helped “save lives” and were an important tool in combating terrorism.

In 2010, Brennan inexplicably declared that jihad was “a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community,” rather than the use of force against non-Muslims to promote the spread of Islam, as it is commonly defined in the Middle East.

Brennan assured the nation that the Obama administration’s drone assassination program had not resulted in “a single collateral death” — a claim widely disbelieved even by administration supporters.

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Pope Francis Strengthens Palestinian Refusal to End Hostilities with Israel by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on January 19th, 2017

By opening the Palestinian embassy during this critical time of intensified anti-Israel animosity, was the Pope justifying the Palestinian-Arab attempt to isolate the Jewish State and to impose on it unacceptable conditions of surrender through international pressure?

Unfortunately, Pope Francis’s papacy has been marked by a long list of anti-Israel gestures which did not advance the cause of peace the Pope claims to champion.

The Pope also met with Palestinian “refugees,” as if the 1948 war were the source of conflict between the two peoples, instead of centuries of Muslims having displaced Christians and other non-Muslims from Persia, the Christian Byzantine Empire, all of North Africa, Southern Spain, and most of Eastern Europe.

The Pope called Abbas an “angel of peace”. Really? An angel of peace? According to Shmuely Boteach, “Abbas spent his life murdering Jews,” by financing the Munich terror attack in 1972, by inciting against Jews and by glorifying Palestinian terrorists. The Pope, in short is praising a corrupt supporter of terrorists, a torturer who has abolished any democratic process in the West Bank.

During these four years, Pope Francis has continually put significant barriers in the way of peace between Israelis and Palestinians — a peace based on dialogue, mutual respect and the end of conflict. Instead, this supposed man of peace has strengthened Abbas’s refusal to negotiate with the Jews — the Christians’ “elder brothers”, as Pope John Paul II bravely called them — and to end hostilities with them. If this is his view of Caritas, what a tragic shame.

Mahmoud Abbas’s activities in Rome began on January 14, with the formal opening of the Palestinian Embassy to the Vatican.

The “Palestinian president”, now in the twelfth year of his four year term, then met with Pope Francis for the third time since the start of his papacy four years ago. The high-profile get-together took place in the middle of the Palestinian attempt to bypass the talks with Israel and to internationalize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A few weeks ago, the UN Security Council in Res. 2334, condemned Israel for its “settlements”; failed to mention any wrongdoing, such countless Palestinian stabbings and car-rammings of Israeli civilians, and the US Administration, which had planned and orchestrated the UN ambush, refused, for the first time in forty years, to veto the anti-Israel resolution, thereby ensuring it would pass.

This week, on January 15, 2017, the “Palestinian question” dominated the French summit in Paris. By opening the Palestinian embassy during this critical time of intensified anti-Israel animosity, was the Pope justifying the Palestinian-Arab attempt to isolate the Jewish State and to impose on it unacceptable conditions of surrender through international pressure?

Unfortunately, Pope Francis’s papacy has been marked by a long list of anti-Israel gestures which did not advance the cause of peace that the Pope claims to champion.

When the Pope landed in Israel n 2014, he was photographed praying at Israel’s security barrier, which had been created simply to stop the wave of Palestinian suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. The Pope then stood beneath a graffiti that compares Palestinians with Jews under the Nazis. “Bethlehem looks like the Warsaw Ghetto”, the graffiti said. If it does, it only looks that way because, since the once Christian-majority city Bethlehem was transferred to total Palestinian Authority control in 1995, most of its beleaguered Christians have fled.

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Turkey and Terrorists by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on January 19th, 2017

Common sense would expect such a front-runner victim at least to have some sense of empathy for terror victims elsewhere. Right? Wrong. Not in Turkey.

Unfortunately, Erdogan’s ideological attachments visibly defeat his fake rhetoric that there are no good terrorists and bad terrorists.

Unsurprisingly, Erdogan who “opposes terror regardless of the terrorist’s identity, rhetoric or [religious] faith … whoever it targets,” has not condemned the latest attack in Jerusalem.

Ten statements in total condemning terror. Not a single word for the young victims of terror in Jerusalem.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a good point when, a day after a terrorist attack in Istanbul killed 38 people on Dec. 10, he said that he condemned all terrorism in Turkey and expected that Turkey did the same when terror targeted Israel. “The fight against terrorism must be mutual,” Netanyahu said. “It must be mutual in condemnation and in countermeasures, and this is what the State of Israel expects from all countries it is in contact with, including Turkey,” Netanyahu said a day before Ankara and Jerusalem formally normalized their frozen diplomatic relations. Netanyahu’s expectation was legitimate but not realistic, especially with Turkey.

A few days later, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman issued an order outlawing the Istanbul-based International Kanadil Institute for Humanitarian Aid, a Turkish aid group, accusing it of funnelling money to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. “The Kanadil foundation is identified with Hamas and with the Muslim Brotherhood and in recent years had been used as a main pipeline for funding projects by Hamas in Jerusalem,” Lieberman’s spokesperson said in a statement. Turkey’s logistical and political support for its ideological next of kin, Hamas, did not come as a surprise, despite normalization with Israel: for Turkey’s rulers, there are terrorists, and terrorists who go with fancy tags.

In a November interview with Israel’s Channel 2, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he does not view Hamas as a terrorist organization. He called it instead a “political movement born from [a] national resurrection.” He also said he meets with Hamas “all the time.”

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Turkey Turns Church into Museum; Greece Builds New Mosque by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on January 19th, 2017

When one talks about Christians in Turkey, one tends to think of them as migrants who moved to the area after Muslims took over or as if Muslims have always been the majority there.

The truth is Bilecik and the rest of Asia Minor, which today has a tiny, dwindling Christian minority, used to be majority-Christian lands, the great Christian-Byzantine Empire.

“The Greek community is dying, and it is not a natural death.” — A Greek an in Istanbul to Helsinki Watch, 1992.

“The Greek community in Istanbul today is dwindling, elderly and frightened,” Helsinki Watch reported. “Their fearfulness is related to an appalling history of pogroms and expulsions that they have suffered at the hands of the Turkish government.” — Helsinki Watch, 1992.

“The conquest of Bilecik is not a random conquest of a territory. The conquest of Bilecik means the establishment of the Ottoman state. And the establishment of the Ottoman state means the beginning of a blessed march. When future generations see this project, they will understand they should be proud of their ancestors and history.” — Selim Yagci, Mayor of Bilecik.

As Turks are taught to take pride in every single thing in their history — including all of the crimes of their ancestors — they still continue committing similar crimes.

Turkish newspapers have recently reported that plans are underway to restore the historic Greek Hagios Georgios Church, referred to as “Aya Yorgi” in Turkish. The church will be converted into a museum and a cultural site.

Osmaneli Mayor Munur Sahin said that the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, also visited the region, and said:

“We re-evaluated the situation of the church. This place will never be opened to worship again. It will serve as a museum and a cultural venue. We obtained the necessary permits; we will bring movable cultural artifacts from around Osmaneli and keep them here.”

The restoration project, approved by the Council of Monuments, is set to be finished in two years. The church lies in ruins — largely because the congregants were either murdered or forcibly deported during and after the 1914-1923 Greek genocide.

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Bomb Threats Called Into 27 Jewish Centers in 17 States By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on January 19th, 2017

Jewish community centers across the country were evacuated today after a fresh wave of bomb threats were called into the facilities.

Federal agents were already investigating a series of bomb threats delivered last week via robocalls and at least one live caller to 16 Jewish center across nine states.

The targeted centers were located in the South, mid-Atlantic region and Northeast.

Today, the JCC Association of North America said threats targeted 27 Jewish community centers across 17 states in a new wave of calls, causing the centers to “quickly engage in security protocols to ensure the safety of their participants and facilities.”

According to an NBC affiliate in Connecticut, a woman called a Jewish center in West Hartford at 9:30 a.m. to say there was a bomb in the building. A center in Woodbridge also received a threat from a woman caller at 9:22 a.m. Classes of preschoolers were evacuated while police searched buildings.

Other reports from around the country put threats between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., with no further details on the callers.

The JCC Association said the latest round of threats were similar to the calls received last week, “causing many evacuations and a disruption to normal operations.”

David Posner, director of strategic performance for the association, said many leaders of community centers took part in a webinar including the Department of Homeland Security “to address concerns and procedures” after the first wave of threats.

“Lessons learned and best practices discussed were clearly on display this morning, and we applaud our JCCs for responding calmly and efficiently. Many JCCs not affected last week took the opportunity to review their own security plans, and speak with local law enforcement,” Posner said, lauding “the quick and thorough response from federal and local law enforcement.”

“The JCCs that have received the all-clear and been deemed safe have resumed regular operations,” he noted, but “we are concerned about the anti-Semitism behind these threats.”

“While the bombs in question are hoaxes, the calls are not. We know that law enforcement at both the local and national level are continuing to investigate the ongoing situation. We are relieved that no one has been harmed and that JCCs continue to operate in a way that puts the safety of their staff, visitors, and premises first.”

The Anti-Defamation League, which said it received reports of threats in New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Delaware, Connecticut, Alabama, California, Maine, Tennessee, South Carolina, Missouri, Texas and Kansas, issued a security advisory to Jewish institutions across the country.

“Although so far these threats do not appear to be credible, we are recommending that Jewish communal institutions review their security procedures and remain in close contact with law enforcement,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “While each incident needs to be taken seriously and investigated closely, thus far we are not aware of any of these threats being substantiated.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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What Happens Next? By Roger Kimball

Posted By on January 19th, 2017

The organized hysteria on the Left gets shriller, but sillier, by the day.

Those who are ignorant of history, George Santayana remarked, are condemned to repeat it. It’s not quite true, of course.

Santayana’s elder tradesman, Heraclitus, was right when he said that you cannot step into the same river twice. Whether or not you know anything about it, history, that great river, keeps meandering on. It does not double back.

But Santayana’s oft-quoted remark does have a salutary invigorating effect. Much like that “self-evident half-truth” (as the philosopher Harvey Mansfield put it) that “all men are created equal,” Santayana’s admonition might well exert, on susceptible souls, the goad to learn more about mankind’s adventure in time, which is a good thing. There are patterns to be observed, continuities (and discontinuities) noted, metabolisms of power registered and understood. So even if Santayana overstated the case, the failure to study history — for a culture as well as for individuals — is a sort of existential threat.

Or, to put it positively, a study of history is a prophylactic learning experience.

One of the things one learns, I believe, is that Karl Marx was not always wrong. For example, when he amends Hegel’s declaration that history repeats itself, Marx notes “he forgot to add, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

It tells us something about Marx that the only two choices he he can envision are tragedy and farce. Is there no tertium quid?

Perhaps we are about to find out.

Hysteria tends to feed on itself, so it is no surprise that the #NeverTrump/#AntiTrump brigades have been vying to outdo one another in histrionics. Hundreds of thousands of protestors are about to descend upon Washington, D.C., to dispute the results of an open, democratic election. In many cases, the antics remind one of nothing so much as a distraught toddler who follows his mother around the house and falls down in a tantrum whenever he has her attention. It’s funny when it’s a two-year-old. When the source of the tantrums are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, it is still funny, but also pathetic.

Still, it is worth noting that the minatory rhetoric seems to increase in volume daily. One example: a group called “DisruptJ20” aims to “shut down the inauguration.” David Thurston, a spokesman for the group, stated: “We want to see a seething rebellion develop in this city and across the country.”

Does he have any idea what he is talking about? What about the long tradition in this country of the peaceful transfer of power? “We are not in favor of a peaceful transition of power,” Legba Carrefour, another “DisruptJ20 representative, said. He added: “[W]e need to stop it.”

What are we to make of such melodrama? Are we living through a reprise of 1968? Or, as some have suggested, of 1860, when the country descended into civil war?

As I write, 47 Democratic congressmen have announced that they plan to “boycott” the inauguration (John Lewis doesn’t count: he boycotted when George W. Bush was elected, too, as no Republican is “legitimate” for that race-baiting charlatan).

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The Paris Peace Charade John Kerry’s last diplomatic exertions go nowhere.

Posted By on January 19th, 2017

Diplomats from some 70 countries gathered in Paris over the weekend to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and once more depict Israeli settlements as a grave violation of international law. The conference was a failure, but the conferees could have helped themselves by first checking what French courts have to say about those settlements before scoring Israel again.

In 2013 the French Court of Appeals in Versailles ruled that, contrary to Palestinian arguments, Jewish settlements don’t violate the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition against an occupying power transferring “its civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The law, the court held, bars government efforts to transfer populations. But it doesn’t bar private individuals settling in the disputed territories.

The case arose after Palestinian groups sued the French industrial conglomerate Alstom over its role in the construction of a light-rail line in Jerusalem. The Palestinians lost in the court of first instance, and the Versailles court upheld the lower court’s judgment. The case didn’t go further.

That matters because the Paris conference adopted the premise that settlements are illegal as a matter of settled law and the primary obstacle to peace. The French court makes a nonsense of that judgment simply by looking at what the Geneva Conventions say, rather than basing its judgment on a legally meaningless “international consensus.”

As with so many of the Obama Administration’s Middle East peace efforts, the Paris conference makes untenable territorial demands on Israel and gives Palestinians the hope that they can achieve their aims without making compromises. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the conference as “useless,” while the U.K. refused to accept its closing declaration calling for a final-status agreement that would “fully end the occupation that began in 1967.”

The reality is that Israel will never return to those borders, and no Palestinian state is going to come into existence so long as it is run by kleptocrats in the West Bank and jihadists in Gaza. The next time a similar conference is organized, it would do better to address Palestinian capacity for responsible self-government rather than offer legally dubious claims against Israeli settlements.

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Tom Price’s Trading Days His investments are an argument for index funds, not a case of scandal.

Posted By on January 19th, 2017

Democratic opposition to Donald Trump and his cabinet nominees is consistently shrill, but the inability—or unwillingness—to make distinctions may backfire. Not everything deserves emergency footing, and eventually people tune out. Witness the meltdown over Tom Price’s investment portfolio.

The Georgia Republican and orthopedic surgeon is on deck to lead the Health and Human Services Department, and at Wednesday’s Senate hearing and in the Democratic trade press he stands accused of abusing his office for personal profit. Mr. Price’s net worth includes about $300,000 of stock in health-care-related companies, and over the years he’s sponsored legislation, sent letters or otherwise taken policy positions that reporters are now flyspecking for evidence of insider trading.

To take the latest non-bombshell at face value, Mr. Price took a position in 2015 in a company called Zimmer Biomet that makes hip, knee and other replacements. The same year, HHS proposed changing how Medicare pays for such devices. In a letter Mr. Price cosigned, he warned that the new system “could have a negative impact on patient choice, access and quality,” and he asked HHS to delay the project. In 2016 he cosponsored legislation to do so.

According to the daisy-chain allegations, the HHS proposal would reduce reimbursements for joint replacements, and therefore harm Zimmer Biomet’s profits, and therefore Mr. Price intervened. But the rule went forward in 2016 despite Mr. Price’s criticism, and he has been consistent as someone with health-care expertise in scrutinizing all HHS regulations he believes undermine patient care.

About 5,000 bills are introduced in every Congress and far more “dear colleague” letters are posted. This background noise is rarely market-moving, and Members of Congress are not prohibited from trading. Politicians aren’t insiders in the classic definition, meaning they don’t work for companies and owe a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Many Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, such as Tom Carper and Mark Warner, also hold health-care shares.

In any case, the Zimmer Biomet purchase was made by Mr. Price’s Morgan Stanley broker and became known to him only for financial-disclosure compliance. The broker bought 26 shares whose total value has risen by about $300 in the months since. If Mr. Price really is self-dealing, he’s doing a lousy job.

The larger question is whether politicians, or any nonprofessional investor for that matter, should hold individual securities. As a matter of financial literacy, most small investors should opt for index funds, eliminating the familiar day-trading peril of buying high and selling low, with low transaction costs to boot.

The political danger is the appearance of conflicts of interest, which is why Members would be wise to not actively trade, whatever the law allows. Chief Justice John Roberts recently had to recuse himself from a patent case because he discovered after oral argument that the petitioner was a subsidiary of a company whose stock he owned, which means the outcome could flip in favor of the Supreme Court’s judicial liberals. Why public officials think they can beat the markets is a mystery, even if such trades don’t interfere with or compromise their public duties.

If Democrats were praising index funds and divesting their own portfolios, they’d be more credible critics. Inflating Mr. Price’s boring investments into scandals guarantees that when something does merit outrage, fewer people will believe it.