Another way of framing the same question is asking which U.S. president was strongest on pursuing America’s interests.
As Israel and America are different countries, they often have different interests.
Dennis Ross writes: Have the United States and Israel ever had a relationship as bad as the one between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
That is a question I am typically asked when speaking about my book “Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship From Truman to Obama.” The answer is yes. Ronald Reagan had a poor relationship with Menachem Begin, saying at one point, “Boy, he is a hard guy to like.” And the only leader in the world who George H.W. Bush dealt with but did not like was Yitzhak Shamir, believing Shamir had misled him in their very first meeting after Bush became president.
Posted inAmerica, Israel|Comments Off on Which one of these presidents was toughest on Israel?
In different contexts, the same people are likely to be warmongers or humanitarians. Sometimes, to be humane to your own people, you have to wage war on your enemies. Israel, if it is to survive as a Jewish state in the middle of a hostile Arab region, must be constantly prepared to go to war. It can’t lose one war or it is over.
JTA: Yes, there’s the Avigdor Lieberman who wants to behead bad guys, mandate loyalty oaths and pay Arabs to leave the country — the one who makes fun of the disabled and who dodged a fraud charge.
But Israel’s onetime foreign minister and maybe-next defense minister is not quite the cartoon he’s made out to be – OK, the cartoon he at times seems determined to make himself out to be.
As defense minister, Lieberman would double to two the Cabinet ministers who have seriously considered a two-state outcome: himself and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is more deferential to the United States- Israel relationship than Netanyahu. And his posture toward Israel’s Arab neighbors is not all threat.
It’s time to review three areas where the once and possibly future member of the security cabinet has served as a voice for moderation – but also to keep in mind how his rhetoric undercuts his apparent restraint.
Two states for two peoples, or transfer and a recipe for unrest?
Lieberman has spoken seriously and extensively about peace, and has in fact embraced two states, even though he rankled disability advocates a year ago when he called two-state advocates “autistic.”
One of his most radical ideas would crack the sequencing that famously helped scuttle the 2000 Camp David peace talks: Yasser Arafat, then the Palestinian leader, was considering embracing then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s proposals, but balked when he toured the Arab and Muslim worlds and was told he would be seen as a quisling if he agreed to Barak’s terms, particularly on Jerusalem.
Lieberman’s solution: negotiate holistically. Make peace with the Arabs and the Palestinians simultaneously. It’s a plan that would allow the Palestinians greater leverage, should they coordinate with other Arab nations to extract concessions. That’s one reason why Netanyahu insists on direct talks, where Israel holds more cards. But, the thinking goes, it also could lead to a more stable and permanent peace in the region. Liberman, looking toward activating this plan, could keep Netanyahu focused on working with moderate Arabs in the region.
“The security advantage means cooperation with moderate nations, exchanging intelligence, joint efforts,” Lieberman told Al Monitor in 2014. “With regard to this facet, our partners could gain very nice inputs. And there’s also the economic sphere. I am convinced that one day, we’ll have embassies in Riyadh, in Kuwait, in the Gulf States and other places. The combination of our initiative, technology and knowledge with their tremendous financial reserves can together change the world.”
His proposal to swap heavily populated areas – Arab-heavy regions of Israel bordering the West Bank with Jewish-heavy portions beyond the Green Line – is what has stirred controversy. Lieberman tries to make it sound like common sense: Jews want to live chez-eux, why wouldn’t Palestinians?
For one thing, not every Israeli Arab wants to live in a Palestinian state – subtle but deep-seated differences have emerged between the populations since 1948. Israeli Arabs have said they resent being considered as pawns.
For another, Lieberman proposes paying Israeli Arabs to leave – a transfer policy that would undercut his hopes that Israel would no longer be an international “punching bag,” as he told Al-Monitor.
Yuli Tamir, a former education minister, wrote in Haaretz in 2015 that Lieberman’s plan sets dangerous precedents, by positing that minorities cannot exist with majorities, and by suggesting that majority Arab areas of Israel should seek sovereignty.
Posted inIsrael|Comments Off on JTA: Warmonger or humanitarian? Getting to know Avigdor Lieberman
One of the first pieces I ever published on VDARE.com, on September 4th 2001, was about Australia’s policy towards illegal immigrants. Titled “Nice Guys Get Illegal Immigrants,” that piece reported on the Tampa incident.
Tampa was a small Norwegian cargo ship that had rescued 438 illegals, mostly Afghans, from an Indonesian fishing boat—owned by people smugglers, of course—that had foundered on its way to Australian territory.
The Australian government took a firm line. An international incident involving Australia, Norway, and Indonesia followed.
As my title indicated, the point of my article was to predict that the Tampa illegals would eventually be allowed to settle in Australia. In fact New Zealand took a third of them. Of the others, many were settled in Australia (I can’t find precise numbers), but others were repatriated to Afghanistan when the Taliban government fell.
The Tampa incident led to implementation of the “Pacific Solution,” under which Australia paid small, poor nearby island nations to accommodate illegals in camps while refugee claims were investigated.
The Pacific Solution has undergone some modifications and name changes, but is still the basis of Australian policy towards illegals today.
Australians seem stubbornly resolved that right of settlement in their country should be determined by them and their representatives, not by people-smuggling criminal gangs.
To their great credit, Australia has continued to apply its immigration laws firmly, refusing settlement rights to illegals except where claims to refugee status meet a high standard of proof.
As Prime Minister John Howard said at the time of the Tampa incident: “We cannot surrender our right as a sovereign country to control our borders. We cannot have a situation where people can come to this country when they choose.”
That approach is very shocking to immigration romantics in Australia and elsewhere. Monday’s New York Times ran an op-ed by Roger Cohen, a stalwart defender of the Indonesian crime cartels huddled masses yearning to breathe free:
SYDNEY, Australia — The Australian treatment of refugees trying to reach this vast, thinly populated country by boat follows textbook rules for the administering of cruelty. It begins with the anodyne name for the procedures — “offshore processing” — as if these desperate human beings were just an accumulation of data.
Note please that Australia is “thinly populated” for a very good reason: most of the place is uninhabitable.
It continues with the secrecy shrouding what goes on “offshore” in the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, where a total of more than 1,350 people languish with no notion of how their limbo will end, where they will go or how to get answers to their predicament. Under the Australian Border Force Act of last year, disclosure by any current or former worker of “protected information” is punishable by up to two years in prison.
It goes further with the progressive dehumanization of people — dubbed “illegals” without cause — who are caught in this Australian web under a policy now dating back almost four years. They are rarely visible. They are often nameless, merely given identification numbers. Women and children are vulnerable in squalid conditions where idleness and violence go hand in hand.
While I’m trawling my archives, I may as well link to a piece I wrote back in October 2000 scoffing at news outlets putting scare quotes around the i-word. [Who Are You Calling “Illegal”? National Review Online, October 17th 2000.] Why don’t they listen?
The refugees are consistently demeaned, as when the conservative immigration minister, Peter Dutton, said this month that they could not read and would somehow contrive at once to steal Australian jobs and “languish in unemployment queues” — a statement that prompted Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to call Dutton “outstanding,” no less.
Turnbull, who came to office with a reputation for being from the more progressive wing of the conservative Liberal Party but has proved beholden to the hard-line right, faces an election in early July. Clearly both he and Dutton reckon casting the marooned of Nauru and Manus Island as threats to Australia will play well with voters.
Beyond electoral calculations, people are dying. Last month, a young Iranian refugee, Omid Masoumali, self-immolated on Nauru and died in a Brisbane hospital. Soon after, a 21-year-old Somali refugee, identified only as Hodan, set herself on fire and was taken in critical condition to Brisbane. Their acts were reflections of the desperation and exhaustion inflicted by Australia under a policy that was supposed to be temporary, has not been thought through, and places people in conditions of hopelessness.
Perhaps “offshore processing” was supposed to afford the government plausible deniability. Australia would pay billions of dollars to poor Nauru and poor Papua New Guinea to take a big problem off its hands. But in reality there can be no plausible deniability. On the contrary, by any ethical standard, the policy engages Australian responsibility for cruelty.
Dutton even suggested that human rights advocates bore responsibility for the self-immolations by giving asylum seekers “false hope.” He said the government was “not going to stand for” people trying to twist its arm. Well, a dead person cannot do that, of course.
True: but when a person tells you, “If you don’t do as I wish, I’ll kill myself,” the choice before you is either to clearly assert your own autonomy or to surrender your will to his.
“We don’t see the boats, we rarely see a human face and there is a black hole of accountability,” said Madeline Gleeson, a human rights lawyer and the author of the recently published book Offshore. She told me, “The international community does not understand how outrageous this policy is, how far from basic human standards and how shot through with violence and sexual abuse.”
The government argues it is keeping the country safe from terrorism, preventing a proliferation of Australia-bound boats that could result in deaths on a scale seen in the Mediterranean, and ensuring its immigration policy remains orderly. In the current fiscal year, the country has offered to take in 13,750 people under its Humanitarian Program, and committed, exceptionally, to a further 12,000 from the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts (a handful of them have been processed). But it has vowed that nobody in Nauru or on Manus Island will gain admission to Australia.
Australia’s “offshore processing” is falling apart and must end. The Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled in April that the Australian-funded detention center on Manus Island was illegal. In Australia, only retroactive legislation enacted after a lawsuit was filed provided legal support for a policy that was in effect pursued illegally since 2012.
This country’s history includes the long and unhappy chapter of its White Australia policy under which a vast land mass was portrayed as under threat of invasion by uncivilized “natives” from across Asia. Politicians like Dutton are playing scurrilously on similar fears.
The White Australia policy was an effort to maintain Australia’s character as a European settler nation. In 1926, when my father went to Australia, the population was 5½ million. China and Imperial Japan at that time had populations of 320 million and 80 million respectively; and “uncivilized” is not an inappropriate descriptor for Warlord China. Was the White Australia policy unreasonable?
A nation of immigrants, short of agricultural labor, Australia has benefited when it has overcome its fears, as with the admission of Vietnamese “boat people” in the 1970s. As Steven Glass, an international lawyer, observed in introducing Eva Orner’s new movie, “Chasing Asylum,” “What, exactly, are we scared of?” Even women raped and impregnated on Nauru have been treated as if they are security threats.
Bring those stranded in Nauru and on Manus Island, many of whose refugee claims have already been deemed legitimate, to Australia. Treat them with humanity as their demands for permanent settlement are assessed. Scrap a policy that shames a nation with its pointless cruelty. [Australia’s Offshore Cruelty by Roger Cohen; NY Times, May 23rd 2016.]
Posted inAustralia|Comments Off on NY TIMES to Australia: Open Those Borders!
For a clue, consider how badly the elite media continues to miss the point of the most notorious thing he ever said, this infinitely denounced passage in his June 16, 2015, speech announcing his candidacy:
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically. The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems…. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Obviously from context, Trump’s “They’re rapists” does not mean, as often alleged, “They’re all rapists.” Instead, he’s raising the apparently excessively subtle question: “Why, with all the world to choose from, do we let immigrate any rapists?”
After all, the Harvard admissions office doesn’t feel satisfied if they hold their rapist admission rate down to the national average. America is the Harvard of immigrant destination countries, so why should it import problem people?
But, to the press, that question seems inappropriate to ask. America isn’t worthy of high standards like Harvard is. Instead, the 7 billion citizens of foreign countries should be assumed to have a civil right, under the Zeroth Amendment to the Constitution, to move to America whenever they feel like it—especially if a majority of Americans don’t want them here.
Moreover, it’s striking how few in the press demonstrated any understanding of Trump’s statement “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.”
The obvious question ought to be: Who is the “they” in that sentence?
“One reason that nobody in the U.S. pays attention to Mexico is because Mexican elites have wanted it that way.”
Clearly, Trump is accusing the Mexican ruling class—the politicians and billionaires like Carlos Slim, the largest single shareholder of The New York Times—of dumping their surplus population on the United States.
That Mexico’s elites are outmaneuvering America’s leaders strikes Trump as a bad thing. Yet, to the American media, the very existence of a Mexican ruling caste with interests different from those of American citizens doesn’t seem to register as a concept with which they are able to deal. Sure, Mexico is a country of over 120 million people that shares a 1,950-mile border with the U.S., but it’s not, you know, Israel when it comes to being important to American interests.
Slim is intermittently the richest man in the world, which could be thought an intriguingly curious phenomenon in a country that is supposed to be so poor that it would be a war crime to tell their illegal aliens to go home.
And Slim has close ties of blood and marriage to the fascist warlord clans of Lebanon that carried out some of the most notorious atrocities in recent Middle Eastern history. Yet that human-interest story never came up in the American press.
The New York Times, though, has been covering the Mexican ruling class’ objections to Trump. For example:
But it hasn’t mentioned the dirty little secret of this whole contretemps. As one of the rare Mexican-American pundits, Ruben Navarette Jr., pointed out last summer:
Mexican Elites Secretly Agree With Donald Trump
They’re all hating on him now, but the fact is, when they’re just among themselves, Mexico’s elites roundly agree with The Donald on Mexican immigrants.
Of the many different reactions to Donald Trump’s inaccurate and insulting comments about how Mexican migrants to the United States come from the bottom of the barrel, one of the most interesting has been that of wealthy and powerful Mexican elites who are suddenly long on indignation and outrage but short on memory and self-awareness. That’s because Trump’s dismissive comments about how the United States has become a “dumping ground” for castaways from Mexico sound like something you’d hear bandied about at a Guadalajara country club or a fancy banquet in Mexico City.
What other jobs are they going to do? Computer programmer? The average Somali IQ is 68, below what is considered mentally retarded.
Washington Post: LIBERAL, Kan. — First a stream of newcomers started renting ramshackle homes by the train tracks, and then a two-room mosque opened on a nearby street corner, and then an African grocery store took the space of what had once been a used car lot.
And then, one day early last year, a bus pulled up to the Greyhound station and out came the latest arrival to the growing neighborhood known as “Little Somalia.” Mohamed Ahmed, 23, held one suitcase and clutched a plastic bag with migration documents — the evidence of a trek in which he’d fled warring Somalia as a young child, lost his father and spent years living with the remainder of his family under a United Nations tent in the Kenyan desert. His journey to America had been nearly two decades in the making, and now he was coming to its heartland — as were thousands of other Somali refugees — to take a grisly job that few others in his new country wanted to take.
Posted inSomalia|Comments Off on WP: For Somalis, hope falls to the cutting floor – Refugees entrapped by popular meat industry
Washington Post: Taylor Swift is not a white supremacist. She doesn’t identify as a neo-Nazi, and there is no evidence to suggest that, behind closed doors, she might.
That hasn’t stopped some white supremacists from the “alt-right,” a fringe group of the movement that often uses humor and message boards like 4chan to spread its ideology, from reportedly choosing her — ironically or not remains unclear — as an icon for their movement. In much the same way Cher or Barbra Streisand can be seen as “gay icons,” a series of Internet memes, articles and message board posts have dubbed Swift an “Aryan goddess.”
It appears to have begun in 2013 when a teenager named Emily Pattinson began overlaying quotes by Adolf Hitler on Pinterest photos of Taylor Swift as a joke, Buzzfeed reported. Swift’s lawyer J. Douglas Baldridge, sent Pinterest a stern letter, asking for the images to be removed. It said, in part:
The association of Ms. Swift with Adolf Hitler undisputedly is ‘harmful,’ ‘abusive,’ ‘ethnically offensive,’ ‘humiliating to other people,’ ‘libelous,’ and no doubt ‘otherwise objectionable.’ It is of no import that Ms. Swift may be a public figure or that Pinterest conveniently now argues that the Offending Material is mere satire or parody. Public figures have rights. And, there are certain historical figures, such as Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson and the like, who are universally identified in the case law and popular culture as lightning rods for emotional and negative reaction.
Pinterest refused to take it down, citing parody laws. But those same images now appear on The Daily Stormer, which bills itself as “the world’s most visited alt-right website.”
The site was founded by self-proclaimed white supremacist Andrew Anglin after he realized Internet users were more interested in quick-hit, meme-type content than the long essays on white supremacy he would post on his previous site, “Total Fascism.”
“My ideology is very simple,” Anglin told the Los Angeles Times. “I believe white people deserve their own country.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center dubbed it a “neo-Nazi website” and one of the two most popular “hate sites” online. Dylann Roof, the alleged shooter in the Charleston church massacre, was active on the site, and the idea of “white student unions,” which popped up around the country last November, percolated there.
The idea of Swift as an alt-right pop icon seems to have percolated there as well.
“Taylor Swift is a pure Aryan goddess, like something out of classical Greek poetry,” Anglin told Vice’s Broadly. “Athena reborn. That’s the most important thing.”
Columnist Milo Yiannopoulos explained in Breitbart the alt-right thinks “Swift is covertly ‘red-pilled,’ concealing her secret conservative values from the progressive music industry while issuing subtle nods to a reactionary fanbase.”
Yiannopoulos wrote that Swift presents a perfect storm: she’s white, blonde and doesn’t speak about her politics. Meanwhile, she’s drawn criticism regarding race in recent years.
In Pacific Standard, writer Aaron Bady accused Swift of being “nostalgic for a time when you could be nostalgic for white supremacy” after her Africa-set video for “Wildest Dreams” came out, which also prompted the NPR headline “Taylor Swift Is Dreaming Of A Very White Africa.” Writer Camille Paglia inexplicably referred to her both as a “Nazi Barbie” and a “fascist” in a December column for The Hollywood Reporter. And, in 2009, a photo circulated the Internet showing her dancing with a man in a white t-shirt bearing a sloppy red swastika.
These are isolated incidents, but white supremacist websites have taken them out of context. For example, in the photograph, Swift wears a shirt with the letters “JH,” which someone on the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront claimed means “Jew Hater.”
Posted inAlt Right|Comments Off on WP: ‘Alt-right’ white supremacists have chosen Taylor Swift as their ‘Aryan goddess’ icon, through no fault of her own
I don’t recall the MSM naming the race of blacks who commit violent crimes against whites. How come when whites are accused of doing something bad against blacks, the white race is called out?
When a teammate held out his arms after football practice in their high school locker-room, the boy thought he was about to get a hug.
Instead, he got viciously raped, authorities say.
As the teammate restrained the boy, another football player allegedly thrust a coat hanger into the boy’s rectum. Then a third teammate kicked the coat hanger several times, according to a criminal complaint.
The Oct. 23, 2015 incident has rocked the tiny town of Dietrich, Idaho. This spring, after several months of investigation, the state Attorney General’s office filed sexual assault charges against all three alleged attackers. Two of the teenagers are being charged as adults and could face life in prison, under Idaho law.
Earlier this month, the case took an even darker turn when the boy’s family filed a $10 million lawsuit against Dietrich High School.
According to the lawsuit, the alleged rape wasn’t a one-off but rather the culmination of months of racist abuse by white students against the boy, who is black.
The boy “was taunted and called racist names by other members of the team which names included ‘Kool-Aid’ ‘chicken eater’ ‘watermelon’ and [the N-word],” the suit alleges.
The civil complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Idaho also claims that one of the students charged with sexual assault displayed a Confederate flag and demanded the boy recite a racist song titled “Notorious KKK.”
All three of the boy’s attackers were white, the suit says.
Like Ahab’s search for the Great White Whale, liberals’ search for the Great White Defendant is relentless and never-ending. When, in 1988, Tawana Brawley’s and Al Sharpton’s then year-old spectacular charge that several white men including prosecutor Steven Pagones (whose name Brawley had picked out of a newspaper article) had abducted and raped the 15 year old was shown to be completely false, the Nation said it didn’t matter, since the charges expressed the essential nature of white men’s treatment of black women in this country. When the Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper last year, liberals everywhere treated the accusation as fact, because, just as with the Nation and Tawana Brawley, the rape charge seemed to the minds of liberals to reflect the true nature of oppressive racial and sexual relations in America.
To see the real truth of the matter, let us take a look at the Department of Justice document Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2005. (Go to the linked document, and under “Victims and Offenders” download the pdf file for 2005.)
In Table 42, entitled “Personal crimes of violence, 2005, percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender,” we learn that there were 111,590 white victims and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault in 2005. (The number of rapes is not distinguished from those of sexual assaults; it is maddening that sexual assault, an ill-defined category that covers various types of criminal acts ranging from penetration to inappropriate touching, is conflated with the more specific crime of rape.) In the 111,590 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was white, 44.5 percent of the offenders were white, and 33.6 percent of the offenders were black. In the 36,620 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was black, 100 percent of the offenders were black, and 0.0 percent of the offenders were white. The table explains that 0.0 percent means that there were under 10 incidents nationally.
The table does not gives statistics for Hispanic victims and offenders. But the bottom line on interracial white/black and black/white rape is clear:
In the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man.
What this means is that every day in the United States, over one hundred white women are raped or sexually assaulted by a black man.
The Department of Justice statistics refer, of course, to verified reports. According to the Wikipedia article on rape, as many as half of all rape charges nationally are determined by police and prosecutors to be false:
Linda Fairstein, former head of the New York County District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit, noted, “There are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about half simply did not happen…. It’s my job to bring justice to the man who has been falsely accused by a woman who has a grudge against him, just as it’s my job to prosecute the real thing.”
No wonder there was such absolute belief in the guilt of the Duke students among the leading sectors of liberal America. A drug-addled, half-deranged, promiscuous black stripper accused three young white men of raping her. There are virtually zero rapes of black women by white men in the United States, and half of all rape charges against specific individuals turn out to be false. But in the gnostic, inverted world of liberal demonology, the white students had to be guilty.
Meanwhile, in the real America, week after week, the newspapers report the rapes of white women by black men—though, of course, without ever once using the words, “a white woman was raped by black man.” Just last week in the New York Post there was a story about a serial black rapist who invaded women’s apartments on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; you knew the rapist was black from a police drawing accompanying the story, and you knew the victims were most likely white from the neighborhoods where the attacks occurred. But even when news media’s reports of black on white rape make the race of the perpetrator evident (which the media only does in a minority of instances), no explicit reference is ever made to the racial aspect of the case. Each story of black on white rape is reported in isolation, not presented as part of a larger pattern. There is never the slightest mention of the fact that white women in this country are being targeted by black rapists. In the inverted world of liberalism, the phenomenon does not exist.
Posted inBlacks, Rape|Comments Off on WP: White high school football players in Idaho charged with raping black, disabled teammate with a coat hanger
Glenn Reynolds writes: The state is “a gang of thieves writ large,” economist Murray Rothbard is said to have remarked. I’ve always viewed that sort of comment with a bit of skepticism. But now I’m beginning to wonder.
I wonder more when I read things like this report from the Washington Examiner: “The CIA’s inspector general is claiming it inadvertently destroyed its only copy of a classified, three-volume Senate report on torture, prompting a leading senator to ask for reassurance that it was in fact ‘an accident.’”
Here’s a hint: It very likely wasn’t.
Is that unfair? I mean, it could have been an accident, right? Yeah it could have been. But it wasn’t. Accidents like that just don’t happen — or, when they do, they’re generally not accidents. And it’s right for people who have custody of evidence to know that any convenient “accidents” will give rise to the presumption that they had something pretty awful to hide, and that they hid it.
But, of course, the CIA’s “accident” was only the latest in a long rash of “accidental” losses of incriminating information in this administration. The IRS — whose Tea Party-targeting scandal is now over 1,100 days old without anyone being charged or sent to jail — seems to have a habit of ”accidentally” destroying hard drives containing potentially incriminating evidence. It has done so in spite of court orders, in spite of Congressional inquiries and in spite of pretty much everyone’s belief that these “accidents” were actually the deliberate, illegal destruction of incriminating evidence to protect the guilty.
Then there’s Hillary’s email scandal, in which emails kept on a private unsecure server — presumably to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures — were deleted. Now emails from Hillary’s IT guy, who is believed to have set up the server, have gone poof.
“Destroy the evidence, and you’ve got it made,” said an old frozen dinner commercial. But now that appears to be the motto of the United States government.
So why do the rest of us bother to obey the law? And, yes, that’s an increasingly serious question.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Glenn Reynolds: When leaders cheat, followers … follow
From Breitbart: The male ringleader who led a protest against Milo Yiannopoulos at this evening’s event in DePaul University has been identified as student and church minister Edward Ward.
Ward stormed the stage during Yiannopoulos’ talk earlier today with a female accomplice, and threatened to punch Yiannopoulos whilst security stood back and refused to intervene.
“The campus left constantly brands people like me as “dangerous,” a threat to student safety and wellbeing. Yet they’re the ones who are happy to threaten a gay British conservative with physical violence. Even more astonishing is the fact that Mr. Ward is apparently a Minister. I don’t think his actions today were very Christlike” said Yiannopoulos.
“Will DePaul have the courage to discipline Edward Ward for his behaviour? In a normal world they would, but there’s a nasty institutionalized habit of letting left-wing activists get away with the worst of offences. After all, despite forking out nearly a grand in security costs, they wouldn’t even stop the activists from storming the stage.”
Ward, who was previously homeless before becoming an active leader in his local church, was identified on Twitter shortly after the disruption with his currently unidentified female accomplice. Since the altercation, numerous users on social media have called for sanctions against the individuals, including their arrest for assault and violent threats.
According to his Facebook page, Ward is a Political Science alumnus of DePaul University, and a youth organizer at “Blocks Together,” a community organizing group in Chicago. After graduating from DePaul, Ward founded Men Of Vision and Empowerment (M.O.V.E), a “youth empowerment group” in the same city. He was the subject of a glowing profile in DePaul’s online student newspaper, which tipped him for state office.
Posted inBlacks|Comments Off on Man Who Threatened Milo At DePaul Identified As Church Minister Edward Ward
REPORT: Another day, another gag–broken. This time, the accused is a prominent Israeli ultra-Orthodox Rabbi, Naftali Maklev, accused of raping three nieces, “hundreds of times” over the course of “many years.” One of the victims was 6 years-old when the alleged crimes began.
This is according to a report published by Mako, the online news site of TV Channel 2. He is a well-known figure in the Haredi community, a rabbi at the Be’er HaTorah yeshiva. He serves, in what can only be seen as a dark irony, as a spiritual counselor at the school.
Maklev’s name is under the proverbial Israeli gag order, which prevents the Israeli public from knowing the identity of the accused and weighing the gravity and credibility of the charges against him. Pro-Israel commenters on last night’s post which brought news of a prominent judge accused of sexually abusing his daughter, claimed inexplicably that such gag order actually protected the privacy of the child. I find this argument not only utter nonsense, but a shameful breach of our obligation to the victims to ensure neither they nor others suffer such things again.
One of the methods he used to persuade his victims to permit his behavior were false halachic rulings which he invented to justify himself. He told his victims that not only were the sex acts not prohibited, but rather they were mitzvot (or acts approved by God). He further claimed the sex was a form of healing for various ailments which afflicted him and that not only his health, but his life were dependent on them.
This line of thinking is also common to another more prominent accused Israeli sexual predator, Daniel Taub, candidate for a plum foreign ministry assignment. He told investigators that the late night male visitors to his ambassadorial residence in London were “new age healers” meant to help him with various conditions from which he “suffered.”
Maklev allegedly gave the victim several hundred shekels each time he raped her. The money was meant to ease the family precarious financial condition. He reminded her regularly of the financial obligations of her father which he covered, in order to increase her dependence on, and servility to him. Maklev’s behavior continued even after the victim was married and became a mother.
The accused also raped this victim’s sister after the latter became married. He told the second victim that he intended to offer her correct “guidance” in sexual matters and that he did this with the approval of her husband. He told her that she suffered from a case of “nerves” and that his sexual “therapy” was designed to soothe her and improve her family relations. When she told him that she preferred a treatment that involved medication, he warned her she could become addicted, and that their contact was permissible since it happened “within the family.”
The charge sheet also accuses Maklev of exploiting his respected position in the community and his status as a Torah scholar to inveigle himself into the family of his victims. Further, he arranged financial support for the family, which left it vulnerable to his predatory behavior.
Unfortunately, this is behavior all too common in the Orthodox rabbinate. Examples abound of Orthodoxrabbis who’ve exploited their respected role in the community to prey on their male and female disciples and followers.
Posted inAbuse, Rabbis|Comments Off on Orthodox Rabbi Arrested for Raping Nieces “Hundreds of Times”
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
