FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump Must Change US Defense Policy for Taiwan By Stephen Bryen

Posted By on November 13th, 2016

United States defense policy toward Taiwan must change. Now there is a rare opportunity to make that happen with the election of Donald Trump. But everyone knows he lacks experience in foreign affairs, although he is a man with great instincts. If he can prevail over the established litany, there is a chance that Taiwan can stay independent. But if he follows the “party line” from the State Department and their supporting chorus in parts of the Pentagon, Taiwan is a goner. It is only a question of time.

Taiwan is an island that lives next to a behemoth in the form of China. It is a democracy and, with its new government with a very strong domestic mandate, intent on maintaining its independence and democratic system. For China, democracy is the enemy as they have just demonstrated again in Hong Kong where they blocked two elected officials from taking office. Democracy threatens the Communist party dictatorship, and China is yearning for it. That is what happened before at Tiananmen, where democratic dissent was ruthlessly suppressed. And across China that is happening every day, and China’s government knows it. For them, the big thumb in their eye is Taiwan. They would take any opportunity to knock it off, and China has been building up forces to make it hard for the United States to come to Taiwan’s defense. When China’s forces reach a tipping point, and when they think America might back off, they will strike.

The question is not whether but when. America should be following a defense policy that pushes the “when” back to “whether” and puts a price on the “whether” decision that would make it hard for China’s leaders to act, if they were unsure of the outcome.

Unfortunately, America’s support of Taiwan has played directly into China’s hands and put Taiwan at considerable risk.

Consider for example that Taiwan has been allowed to have only half an air force and half a navy.

What is meant by “half”?

BOOKS Comments turned off

Stealing Judaism Review: Richard H. Schwartz, ‘Who Stole My Religion?: Revitalizing Judaism and Applying Jewish Values to Help Heal Our Imperiled Planet’ Reviewed byDavid Isaac

Posted By on November 13th, 2016

Richard H. Schwartz accuses his fellow Orthodox Jews of stealing Judaism—even as he attempts to hijack it for his own environmentalist creed.

A man who fell in love with progressive politics first and Orthodox Judaism second, Schwartz married the two in his mind and is now frustrated that the shidduch—or love match—won’t take hold in the larger community. The roughly 10 percent of Jews who are Orthodox are stubbornly conservative. Schwartz laments that, while an overwhelming 78 percent of all Jews went for Barack Obama in 2008, an almost identical percentage of Orthodox Jews voted for John McCain. Given that Schwartz praises Judaism for its heritage of non-conformity (starting with Abraham), he might have celebrated the Orthodox for going their own way. But no, Schwartz seeks 100 percent Jewish support for the current pieties of the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Although Schwartz admits that “Judaism does not recommend any one type of economic system,” that doesn’t stop him from essentially arguing that it does—socialism. He quotes the famous passage where the Prophet Samuel warns the Israelites against a king who will “take your daughters as perfumers and bakers; he will seize your choice fields, vineyards, and olive groves and give them to his courtiers.” Schwartz asks the reader to substitute “international corporations” for “kings.” CEOs are the “corporate kings,” he says. But why not substitute “government” for “king”? Surely, that’s nearer to the original meaning of the text. After all, a CEO can’t conscript you, tax you, or claim eminent domain over your property. These are the types of powers to which Samuel refers.

But the issue that transcends all others for Schwartz is climate change. In apocalyptic fervor, he is right up there with Al Gore and Bill McKibben: Climate change is “the most urgent, immediate problem facing the world today,” with virtually all climate scientists agreeing that “climate change poses an existential threat to life as we know it—and that humans are the cause and the potential solution.” Schwartz invokes Talmudic and Biblical teachings on how mankind should care for the Earth to support his contention that Jews must take a leading role in fighting climate change.

While his citations may cast Judaism in an admirable light, they have nothing to do with climate change, an issue that is far from settled. Schwartz states over and over that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change “poses a major threat to humanity.” But that statistic has been thoroughly debunked. Expert opinion about the severity of climate change is far less uniform than it is typically portrayed.

Schwartz does not for a moment entertain the possibility that the global warming apocalypse (like all apocalyptic forecasts before it) may not materialize and, if it doesn’t, that his drastic efforts to fight it by making everyone a vegan and substituting expensive renewable energy for oil and gas would undercut his other political goals—above all, improving the lot of the poor worldwide.

To enlist Jews in the global warming crusade and other progressive causes, Schwartz enlists the concept of tikkun olam (literally “world repair”). Since the 1950s, this Hebrew phrase has been seized on by Jews who want to make radical ideas more palatable to other Jews.

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

A REVIEW OF “JUDAS” BY AMOS OZ BY SAM SACKS

Posted By on November 13th, 2016

“Judas” ( Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 305 pages, $25), the quietly provocative novel by Israeli writer Amos Oz, concerns a wayward university dropout named Shmuel Ash, who, in Jerusalem in 1959, takes a position as a companion to an elderly invalid. His job is to engage the old man in a few hours of lively debate each evening; in return he receives a monthly stipend and room and board in the house shared by the man and his widowed daughter-in-law, Atalia.

Two strains of history run together in the course of this arrangement. Shmuel is writing a book about “Jewish Views of Jesus.” His argument is that Judas Iscariot, “the hated archetype of all Jews,” was actually the first fervent Christian believer, and far from being a betrayal, his role in bringing about the crucifixion was an attempt to prove Jesus’s divinity.

Mr. Oz layers this interpretation upon the bloody birth of the Jewish state. Atalia’s husband—the old man’s son—was killed during the 1948 war of independence; her late father, furthermore, was a prominent Jewish voice opposed to the creation of Israel, arguing that it was better to try to share the territory with the Arabs than to drive them out. For this quixotic belief, he was deemed a traitor.

Young Shmuel, idealistic and vulnerable—built “like a walking question mark”—discusses these figures at engrossing length with the old man and Atalia, with whom he falls hopelessly in love. Inevitably, their talk about the past reflects upon the future of Zionism. Who should lead the movement, the book asks: realists like David Ben-Gurion (“a clearheaded, sharp-sighted man who understood a long time ago that the Arabs will never accept our presence here of their own free will”) or pacifist dreamers like Atalia’s father? Who are the true believers and who are the traitors?

Mr. Oz has generous sympathy for the overmatched dreamers, yet “Judas” sets down no fixed answers. Aided by Nicholas de Lange’s lucid translation from the Hebrew, it challenges you to think afresh about stories and histories whose interpretations can seem chiseled in stone. It is a novel that prompts questions and self-questioning. What else can one ask from a book?

IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Australia Strikes Deal to Resettle Refugees in U.S. U.S. to vet refugees; most are from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and Sri Lanka By Robb M. Stewart (Huh?????)

Posted By on November 13th, 2016

MELBOURNE, Australia—Some of the hundreds of refugees being held in Australia-backed Pacific island camps are to be resettled in the U.S. under a one-time deal between the countries.

The U.S. government has agreed to accept refugees being held in Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Sunday. Mr. Turnbull didn’t disclose how many were likely to resettled by the U.S. or on what terms, but he stressed the arrangement wouldn’t be repeated or be extended to asylum seekers not already in the camps.

The conservative government has maintained a tough line on asylum seekers who have sought to cross the dangerous waters between Asia and Australia but has moved to empty the offshore immigration detention centers that critics have called Australia’s “Guantanamo Bay.” Negotiations in recent months with various countries to resettle the refugees became more urgent in April when Papua New Guinea’s highest court ordered the closure of Manus, ruling that hundreds of asylum seekers were being held there illegally on Australia’s behalf.

Mr. Turnbull said it had fallen to his government to “stop the boats,” close onshore Australian detention centers and remove children from detention. The deal with the U.S. to handle refugees being held offshore adds to earlier arrangements with Papua New Guinea and Cambodia to accept asylum seekers from the camps.

“Our priority is the resettlement of women, children and families. This will be an orderly process [and] it will not be rushed,” Mr. Turnbull said of the U.S. deal.

The process with the U.S. is due to begin in the coming days and will be administered with the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR. U.S. authorities will conduct their own assessment of refugees and decide which people would be resettled in the U.S., and refugees would need to satisfy standards for admissions, including health and security checks, the Australian government said. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Protests Against President-Elect Donald Trump Continue Across the U.S. Police estimate 25,000 people in New York; 8,000 demonstrators swarm downtown Los Angeles By Pervaiz Shallwani, Kate King Trisha Thadani

Posted By on November 13th, 2016

Tens of thousands of people around the country took to the streets Saturday to protest the election of Donald Trump, the fourth straight day of demonstrations against the Republican president-elect.

In New York, an estimated 25,000 people covered a 20-block stretch of Fifth Avenue outside Trump Tower, the 58-story skyscraper fortified by the New York Police Department and U.S. Secret Service agents.
Two people were arrested, both for trying to hop over a police barricade, a senior police official said. The charges against the two people weren’t immediately clear.

Demonstrators have converged on Trump Tower daily since Mr. Trump was elected Tuesday.

Saturday’s protest was the largest to date but also orderly, compared with earlier protests, the police official said. On Wednesday, police arrested 65 people, almost all for not following orders to stay out of the street.

In Los Angeles, about 8,000 people swarmed into the city’s downtown in one of the largest anti-Trump gatherings on the West Coast.

Throngs of people—including many families and children—filled Wilshire Boulevard, a major city thoroughfare, for a slow planned march downtown. The protesters held signs with slogans that have become familiar in the past few days: “Not My President” and “Reject Hate.”

Some demonstrators wore safety pins—a gesture that has become a global symbol to the marginalized that they are “safe” with the person wearing the pin.

Unlike past nights in L.A. when protesters blocked freeways and dozens were arrested, the afternoon protest was peaceful. Los Angeles Police said they made no arrests as of early evening, and most protesters had gone home, though some said they planned to continue the march.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Donald Trump Boosts Europe’s Anti-Establishment Movement “What America can do we can do as well.” by Soeren Kern

Posted By on November 13th, 2016

“America has just liberated itself from political correctness. The American people expressed their desire to remain a free and democratic people. Now it is time for Europe. We can and will do the same!” — Geert Wilders, Dutch MP, head of the Party for Freedom (PVV), and now on trial in the Netherlands for free speech.

“2016 is, by the looks of it, going to be the year of two great political revolutions. I thought Brexit was big but boy this looks like it is going to be even bigger.” — Nigel Farage, MEP and leader of the UK Independence Party.

“The political class is reviled across much of the West, the polling industry is bankrupt and the press just hasn’t woken up to what’s going on in the world.” — Nigel Farage.

“In a democracy, when the people feel ignored and despised, they will find a way to be heard. This vote is the consequence of a revolt of the middle class against a ruling elite that wants to impose what they should think.” — Laurent Wauquiez, leader of the French opposition party The Republicans.

Donald Trump’s electoral victory has come as a shock to Europe’s political and media establishment, which fears that the political sea change underway in the United States will energize populist parties in Europe.

Anti-establishment politicians, many of whom are polling well in a number of upcoming European elections, are hoping Trump’s rise will inspire European voters to turn out to vote for them in record numbers.

Commenting on Trump’s victory, Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, wrote: “America has just liberated itself from political correctness. The American people expressed their desire to remain a free and democratic people. Now it is time for Europe. We can and will do the same!”

More than a dozen elections will be held in Europe during the next twelve months, beginning with a re-run of the Austrian presidential election scheduled for December 4. Polls show that Norbert Hofer, of the anti-immigration Austrian Freedom Party, is on track to win that race.

Also on December 4, Italians will vote in a referendum on reforming the constitution. Observers say Trump’s victory will make it more difficult for Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, one the few world leaders publicly to endorse Hillary Clinton, to prevail. They say Renzi’s open support for Clinton will hurt Italy’s relations with the United States. Renzi has said he will resign if he loses the referendum, which calls for curbing the role of the Senate. Most opinion polls show the “no” camp ahead. Renzi says the move will simplify decision-making, but opponents say it will reduce checks and balances.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Breaches Nuclear Deal – Again. What’s Next? by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on November 13th, 2016

President Obama is ignoring Iran’s latest violations, and the UN and IAEA reports as well.

In fact, the administration, and State Department spokesman Mark Toner, are defending Iran on this issue, and appear willing to give critical concessions to Iran in the next round of talks in Baghdad this week.

In other words, Iranian leaders would be capable of more freely continuing their nuclear ambition without probing from the IAEA or the international community.

Iran has not yet allowed the IAEA “probes of various high-profile Iranian sites. The International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano is investigating whether Tehran has secretly worked on developing nuclear weapons.

Although the nuclear agreement heavily favors Iran and the main UN Security Council sanctions against Iran have already been lifted, Tehran continues to cheat and violate the terms of this weak nuclear pact.

Turning a blind eye to Iran’s violations will only further empower and embolden Tehran to pursue its nuclear and hegemonic ambitions; ignore UN resolutions and international laws; scuttle US foreign policy objectives, and damage security interests.

One of the terms of the JCPOA accord, which never had any legal legitimacy and which Iran never signed, is that Iran should restrict the amount of specific nuclear materials it possesses during the nuclear deal. According to a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), however, Iran has violated the deal by holding more heavy water, used to produce nuclear weapons, than it is supposed to have.

This is not the first time Iran has violated the terms of the flimsy nuclear agreement with no consequences. In February 2016, Iran exceeded its threshold for heavy water as well. In a previous article, other violations and reports of Iran’s recent cheating and breaches of the nuclear agreement are laid out.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America’s Kristallnacht : Edward Cline See note please

Posted By on November 13th, 2016

I admire Ed Cline and agree with everything he writes, but the word “Kristallnacht” evokes Nazis and genocide…the ultimate expression of racism. The idiots of the post election rioters -and I saw them very close up on Friday night- are disappointed pseudo rebels without real cause. They are thugs but they are not like the Nazis……rsk
Had Hillary Clinton won the election, would the anti-Trump rioters have behaved any differently?No.

Instead of protesting Trump’s election, they’d be celebrating Hillary’s victory with the same appetite for destruction and brutality and carnage. They would be celebrating it in the best Nazi tradition, such as the Night of the Broken Glass., or Kristallnacht in the character of Novemberpogrome. Businesses would be targeted for destruction and looting (see the glass being broken by hooded thugs) and physical attacks on Trump supporters would be common, and ignored by a compliant news media. The Nazis were celebrating the ascendency of the Nazis in German political life. The “Social Justice Warriors” could just as well be celebrating Clinton’s ascendancy to the White House.

“What difference would it make?”

The pretext for the attacks in 1938 was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan in Paris. The attacks were planned and carried out by the Nazi Party to target Jews, the whipping boy blamed for Germany’s economic and other problems. They were targeted, Saul Alinsky style – long before he wrote Rules for Radicals – and isolated and persecuted.

The pretext – and the etymological root of the term pretext, means that the demonstrators then and now were and are acting out a prepared script – is pretending to be “outraged” and “disgruntled” and in violent opposition to Donald Trump’s winning the 2016 presidential election. When multiple mass rallies abruptly occur in multiple cities across the country, from coast to coast, and even in Britain (as Kristallnacht occurred in Germany in 1938) it means that these are no more “spontaneous,” for example, than the Muslim riots and demonstrations against the Mohammad image cartoons. These are all pre-arranged and planned for maximum effect and shock value, to scare the powers that be into concessions.

Some of the rioters are now claiming they are practicing their First Amendment rights. But freedom of speech does not include rioting and terrorizing individua

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The first major defeat of political correctness : Fiamma Nirenstein

Posted By on November 13th, 2016

The chronically guilty mind (it is believed) becomes attached to guilt as a badge of inherent superiority,” writes the psychoanalyst Deborah Tyler in The American Thinkerwhere she examines the psychodynamics of Obama and Hillary Clinton’s politics.

It was fatal for them. In general, recognizing one’s own faults and therefore one’s limits is a springboard for overcoming problems caused not only by ourselves, but also by others.

Trump, a man quite devoted to self-admiration and to the glorification of his actions, make us feel a little worried when he points his finger at Hispanics, immigrants, Islamic terrorists… And yet this was one of the basic tenets of his presidential campaign to move away from the guilt propagated by the Obama administration as the basis of American policy, which imbued its internal and external ethics.

Guilty, responsible, sons and fathers who all share the blame: Americans couldn’t stomach feeling this any longer, geez, given the multitude of troubles they already have.

We are all accustomed to fustigating ourselves: the war? We cynically chose it. Drone strikes? We don’t know if they kill innocent civilians. Immigrants? They’re the result of our imperialist policy. Islamic terrorism? A result of the ideological and social discrimination called Islamophobia that we’ve directed at Muslims; Racial and ethnic inequality, especially between whites and diverse groups? The effect of our racism that always in turn leads to discrimination, violence, and police brutality; sexism and homophobia? These are all vices of capitalist society vis-à-vis a peaceful and innocent world, a left wing world that doesn’t harbor prejudices (and the reverse is true); pollution, climate change, and adulterated foods? The upshot of fierce exploitative policies, including refrigerators, heating, longer life expectancy and a general improvement with regard to living conditions.

Whatever kind of president Donald Trump will be, there are many social and cultural reasons that have decreed an end to the control of the democratic elite associated with Obama’s Chicago-style politics. That said, we must consider the explosion of anger that people wanted to express while sweating, working, fuming and hearing over and over that they are guilty, plus all the dogmas of a political correctness that crucifies them to historical slavery, which forces them to consider themselves responsible for all the troubles of the world, a public danger, a colonial invader instead of that great American friend who runs to the rescue back when it defeated Nazism and many other evils at the cost of so many lives.

And what the heck! Can the leading thinker be Oliver Stone, who has rewritten America’s history by claiming that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed for futile reasons, that Truman was insane because of his unresolved “gender issues,” that Kennedy was killed by the Republicans because he wouldn’t go to war with the USSR… Gradually, we arrive up to the 9/11 attacks as self-inflicted by America upon itself.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

The Pendulum Swings Leftward for the Democrats – And That’s Good News for Donald Trump

Posted By on November 13th, 2016

1. The Parties and the Pendulum

For the Democrats, the news is bad—and it’s about to get worse. Why? Because the ideological pendulum is swinging the Democrats to a far-left place, and a political party doesn’t win from the wings.

To be sure, no ideological swing is permanent, but for the next four years, it seems likely that the Democrats will push themselves leftward, to un-electability at the presidential level.

I’ll get to this pendulum-swinging in a moment, but first, let’s establish the current partisan baseline: In addition to Donald Trump winning the White House, the House Republicans will have 238 seats in the next Congress, and Senate Republicans will have 51. Meanwhile, out in the states, the GOP will control 33 governorships and 67 legislative chambers.

To further illustrate the hole that the Democrats find themselves in, here’s a chart from The Washington Post, which shows that in the last eight years, Democrats have lost 10.2 percent of their Senate seats, 19.3 percent of their House seats, 20.3 percent of their legislatures, and 35.7 percent of their governorships. We can add: These are the lowest Democratic numbers since 1928.

In the caustic words of Post reporter Philip Bump, “That whistling sound you hear is the party Thelma-and-Louise-ing.” Movie fans will recognize that as a reference to the ending scene in the 1991 movie Thelma and Louise, in which the title characters drive off a cliff, plunging to their death.

So what happened? It seemed like only yesterday that the MSM, and the chattering classes overall, were certain that Hillary Clinton was destined for a decisive victory, possibly even a landslide. Yet now, not so much.

So today, the Democrats have something they didn’t particularly wish for: the opportunity for an “agonizing reassessment.” The problem is that such reassessments don’t always end up improving the situation—sometimes they make things worse.

As former CNN pundit Bill Schneider liked to say, an election defeat gives the losing party a chance to “fix” whatever went wrong. The big question, of course, is, “What needs fixing?” And now the post-mortem “autopsy” reports as to the needed fix are coming, one might say, fast and furious.

To be sure, a few Hillary loyalists declare that their woman lost because of “sexism,” or some other retrograde “-ism.” Many more Clintonites blame FBI Director James Comey; shadowy Clinton operative Sidney Blumenthal has gone so far as to claim that the election was a “coup d’etat” staged by “a cabal of right-wing agents of the FBI in the New York office attached to Rudy Giuliani.” Okay, so that’s the thinking of a few Clintonite dead-enders.

Meanwhile, most Democrats, and their barely-undercover allies in the MSM, are coming around to the view that Hillary was a deeply flawed candidate. Here, for example, is the analysis of Politico’s Glenn Thrush, writing that the failure of Clinton’s campaign was:

…proof that a conventional candidate can do practically everything by the numbers (win debates, raise the most cash, assemble the greatest data and voter outreach effort in history) and still fall to a movement impelled by raw emotion, not calculation.