UK Parliament will debate barring Trump from country

Why not ban Trump? After all, I was banned from entering Britain for saying that Islam “is a religion and is a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society.”

If I can get banned for that manifestly true observation, then Trump can certainly be banned for calling for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration in view of jihad terror. One thing British authorities are sure of: it is wrong, wrong, wrong to want to take any action against jihad terror.

“If the United Kingdom is to continue applying the ‘unacceptable behaviour’ criteria to those who wish to enter its borders, it must be fairly applied to the rich as well as poor, and the weak as well as powerful.” That’s a lot of hooey. The “unacceptable behavior” criteria is already applied unfairly. Just days before Pamela Geller and I were banned, the British government admitted Saudi Sheikh Mohammed al-Arefe. Al-Arefe has said:

“Devotion to jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls, and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer. Allah said that if a man fights the infidels, the infidels will be unable to prepare to fight.”

That was acceptable in Britain. My work, which has consistently denounced violence and been in defense of the equality of rights of all before the law, was not. That’s a fair application of the “unacceptable behaviors” criteria?

“UK Parliament Will Debate Barring Trump from Country,” by Carrie Dann, NBC News, January 5, 2016

The British parliament will formally debate a petition later this month from backers wishing to prevent Donald Trump from entering the United Kingdom.

The debate is set for January 18, according to a government announcement Tuesday. The petition, launched after Trump announced his proposal to bar Muslims from entering the United States, has garnered over 568,000 signatures to date.

Online petitions like the one targeting Trump are automatically considered for debate by a Petitions Committee if they garner more than 100,000 signatures.

The petition reads: “The signatories believe Donald J Trump should be banned from UK entry. The UK has banned entry to many individuals for hate speech. The same principles should apply to everyone who wishes to enter the UK. If the United Kingdom is to continue applying the ‘unacceptable behaviour’ criteria to those who wish to enter its borders, it must be fairly applied to the rich as well as poor, and the weak as well as powerful.”…

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99% of Syrians entering U.S. are Muslims – Florida in top five ‘welcoming’ Syrians

Just a quick update on where we are with Obama’s promised 10,000 Syrians to be admitted to the US in FY 2016.  They are off to a slow start diversifying your towns and expanding the Democrat voter base, that is for sure.

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Kentucky is the President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and is advocating for 100,000 Syrian, mostly Muslim, refugees to be placed in your parishes! Of the 674 Syrians so far this year, 3 are Catholics.

archbishop-kurtz

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Kentucky

I’m thinking there are two factors involved:  First, they can’t get them through security screening at anywhere near the numbers they need to make that 10,000 goal (and remember the resettlement contractors are still yammering for 100,000 this year).

And, two, maybe they are running into the same problem that Canada is having—they can’t find enough who want to move permanently to N. America. Why? Because they really want to go home!

The slow pace has nothing to do with grandstanding by the governors which we will tell you about shortly.

According to the US State Department data base we have admitted 674 Syrians in the first three months of the fiscal year (Oct. 1, 2015 to Dec. 31, 2015).  At that rate the feds will get 2,696 here by Sept. 30th, 2016 (obviously far short of 10,000).

99% of the 674 are Muslims (660 are Sunni Muslims).

Here are the top five states “welcoming” Syrians:

  1. California (83)
  2. Michigan (71)
  3. Florida (59)
  4. Texas (56)
  5. Pennsylvania (53)

And, not far behind is KY with 50.

97% of the USCCB migration fund comes from your wallets!  So, of course they want 100,000 Syrians this year!

RELATED ARTICLE: Merkel on Cologne sex assaults – don’t blame refugees

Palm Beach Gardens political math: 4 + 1 = 2 terms

That politicians can be shameless should be no surprise, but sometimes the brazenness of their efforts to hold on to their pedestals (and stipends) can still be jaw-dropping.

Case in point: Palm Beach Gardens Vice Mayor David Levy.

In Palm Beach Gardens in 2014, 79 percent of the voters in this northern Palm Beach County city approved a citizen initiative that limited city council members to two consecutive 3-year terms in office. At the same time, 68 percent of voters approved a second measure making the two-term limit retroactive. The message the voters were sending couldn’t be any clearer.

Nonetheless, four-term council member and current vice mayor David Levy has just announced his candidacy for reelection to a fifthconsecutive 3-year term.

What?

Wait, there’s more. When Palm Beach Gardens resident and term limits supporter Sid Dinerstein launched a legal complaint, Levy — who won election in 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013 — feigned surprise. “I thought it was fairly clear I could run,” he told the Palm Beach Post.

David Levy

Levy is backing his statement by pointing out that he took three months off back in 2012 so therefore the 2010 election shouldn’t count. The problem for Levy is that the Palm Beach Gardens law was written explicitly to prevent such chicanery. The operative language states that “no individual shall beelected to the office of council member for than two (2) consecutive full terms.”

Often term limits laws are written to limit politicians to serving two full terms in office, which gives sleazy politicians a pretext for claiming — a la Levy — that if they resigned a month or two early they didn’t serve their full terms and hence could run again. Not so in Palm Beach Gardens.

But perhaps we should grant Levy some small praise. He is, after all, providing a public service by demonstrating exactly why term limits were needed in Palm Beach Gardens in the first place.

Palm Beach County voters are welcome to send an email to urge Levy to respect the law that they petitioned and voted for and to leave the council with dignity.

VIDEO: Gun Control Debate in the Sunshine State

Christian Ziegler, the Republican Party of Sarasota State Committeeman was on the Alan ABC Channel 7 to debate President Obama’s Executive Order on gun control. Ziegler was on the Alan Cohn Show. Cohn is anchor and managing editor of ABC 7 News at 7:00 p.m

In an email Ziegler wrote:

I appeared on WWSB ABC 7 tonight to debate Ed James III, Democrat for FL House, about President Obama’s Executive Order on Gun Control.

Click here to watch the debate and then, if you have any thoughts about this issue, please reply back to this email [Inform@christiangop.com] and share them with me.

-Christian Ziegler
State Committeeman, Sarasota County

Here is the video of the Alan Cohn Show debate:

RELATED ARTICLE: The Facts Behind 4 of Obama’s Claims About Guns

Integrity Florida Releases Research Report on Florida Ethics Laws

Integrity Florida, the nonpartisan research institute and government watchdog, released a new report today that examines Florida’s ethics laws and measures recent anti-corruption reforms against established benchmarks. The report finds Florida is making progress in the fight against public corruption, but much more remains to be done.

Ethics reforms that were passed in 2013 and 2014 represent the first significant attempt to update the state’s ethics laws since the 1970’s and since the 2012 publication of Integrity Florida’s 2012 report titled Corruption Risk Report: Florida Ethics Laws. That report analyzed federal public corruption conviction data and found that Florida led the nation in corruption convictions from 2000 to 2010. The new report finds Florida is now ranked number three for public corruption convictions behind Texas and California.

“Florida went too long neglecting public corruption and ethical abuses and its citizens have paid a real price for corrupt government practices that have cost taxpayers’ public funds and damaged the state’s reputation” said Ben Wilcox, Research Director for Integrity Florida. “We’ve made progress and the legislature will have the opportunity to act on more anti-corruption solutions in 2016.”

Key Findings

  • Florida is no longer number one in federal public corruption convictions for the ten-year period from 2003 to 2013, the most recent data available. While Florida is still in the top five states ranked at number three with 622 convictions, Texas is now number one with 870 convictions, followed by California at number two with 678 convictions. Federal public corruption convictions in Florida have flattened out and appear to be trending downward.
  • In the 2015 update of the 2012 State Integrity Investigation, Florida’s overall grade for the 14 categories measuring government accountability fell from a C-minus to a D-minus. Florida’s grade was lower in virtually every category measured except in “Ethics Enforcement Agencies.” In that category Florida went from an F grade to a D-minus.
  • While a few of the recommendations of the Nineteenth Statewide Grand Jury
    have been adopted, the majority of those recommendations have never been considered by the Florida legislature.

Policy Recommendations

Ethics Reform/Anti-Corruption legislation that has been filed that would reduce corruption risk if passed in 2016 include:

  • Senate Bill 582/House Committee Bill by the Rules, Calendar and Ethics Committee: These bills would put into law two anti-corruption recommendations that were in the 2010 Nineteenth Statewide Grand Jury Report.
  • Senate Bill 686/House Bill 593: Titled the Florida Anti-Corruption Act of 2016, this an omnibus ethics reform measure that includes the provisions in Senate Bill 582.
  • Online financial disclosure filing system: Create an online, publicly accessible filing system for financial disclosure statements for state and local officials as envisioned in the plan submitted by the Commission on Ethics to the Florida legislature.

Additional Ethics Reform/Anti-Corruption policy solutions that could be enacted to advance government ethics in Florida include:

  • Increase penalties: Increase the maximum civil penalty for violations of ethics laws from $10,000 to $20,000 as recommended by the Florida Commission on Ethics.
  • Self-initiate investigations: Allowing the Commission on Ethics to self-initiate investigations would be the single most effective change in the ethics laws that could be made, both in terms of actually enforcing the law and in terms of public confidence in government.
  • Require all Elected Officials to file Full and Public Financial Disclosure (Form 6): All constitutional officers in Florida are currently required to file Full and Public Financial Disclosure known as Form 6. Many other elected officers, including city officials, are only required to file the less-informative Form 1, known as Disclosure of Financial Interests.
  • Improve fine collections: The problem of officials who fail to pay the automatic fines they receive for failing to file financial disclosure is well-documented. Allowing the Commission to record its final orders as liens on the debtor’s real and personal property would give them another tool to collect unpaid fines.
  • Raise the standard for awarding attorney’s fees against complainants: This would restore the law on recovery of attorney fees to the way it had been construed by the Commission prior to a decision by the 1st District Court of Appeal; that Complainants are held to the same standard applicable to media publications regarding public figures. Under that standard, the Ethics Commission awarded attorney’s fees only against complainants who maliciously and knowingly filed complaints based on false information.
  • Change the burden of proving an ethics violation from “clear and convincing evidence” to a “preponderance of the evidence.”

Read the full report here.

ABOUT INTEGRITY FLORIDA

Integrity Florida is a nonpartisan research institute and government watchdog whose mission is to promote integrity in government and expose public corruption.  More information at www.integrityflorida.org. Download Florida’s Path to Ethics Reform.

The Future of Travel Is Cheaper, Faster, Safer, and Autonomous by Ryan Hagemann

In a classic op-ed, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Marc Andreessen argued “that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.”

From service and retail to manufacturing and the public sector, innovation in software has become a powerful source of increased productivity, efficiency, and economic growth. Many industries have been disrupted — and in some cases upended entirely — as a result of this software revolution. The transportation industry is on the verge of a massive software-driven market disruption, setting the stage for a significant change in the way we work and the way we think about travel, city design, and transportation more broadly.

Take driverless cars. This technology holds the potential to significantly drive down a variety of costs associated with human-operated vehicles. The most striking is the human toll: nearly 100 Americans die every day as a result of human error on the roadways. Automated cars could reduce this number by significant orders of magnitude.

But the benefits don’t stop there. As Adam Thierer and I noted in a research paper last year, the rise of automated vehicles on American roadways could ultimately cause 90 percent of the cost of insurance premiums to vanish, prevent over 4 million car crashes annually, and save more than $350 billion every year.

Despite the regulatory hurdles standing in the way of their widespread adoption, the arrival of autonomous vehicles on our roads is not a question ofif but when. As driverless cars become more cost-effective and socially accepted, the transportation sector will undergo dramatic changes. Over time, it may become cheaper and more convenient to simply hire the services of circulating robot cars than to own, insure, store, and maintain personal fleets. The days when owning a car is the norm are likely coming to an end, for better or worse.

But autonomous vehicles are just one example of transformative innovation in transportation technology.

Electric cars are beginning to find their stride in the market. It’s not clear, at this point, whether they’re really more efficient or eco-friendly than gas-powered cars, but Tesla Motors has shown that people will buy electric cars. Elon Musk has combined savvy reliance on government subsidies and municipal tax breaks with high-quality design and manufacturing, leaving Tesla Motors well-positioned to become a market leader in electric vehicles. The primary consideration when assessing the prospects electric cars is not the current or potential future valuation of Tesla Motors, or other electric car manufacturers, but the price and efficiency of the battery storage technology.

Currently, Tesla motors is estimated to have the lowest per-kWh (kilowatt-hour) price for lithium ion batteries (Li-ion), which is estimated to be about $200 per-kWh. As recently as May 2013 McKinsey Global Institute report examined the future of Li-ion energy storage. It predicted that once per-kWh prices fell to approximately $160, plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles could finally be cost competitive with traditional internal combustion engine vehicles.

However, McKinsey argued that the $160 price point wasn’t likely to be achieved until 2025. Given how low Tesla Motors’ current per-kWh price point is already, that cost-competitive price could very well be achieved sometime in 2016-2017–almost ten years ahead of predictions.

So autonomous cars are heading our way and battery storage technology is making electric vehicles competitive on the market. But the disruptions don’t stop there. Musk is leading the pack in the electric car market, but he also has a grandiose mass transportation project in the works: the Hyperloop.

The Hyperloop was first announced back in 2013, and was touted by Musk as the future of cross-continental and inter-city transportation. The idea is to use electromagnetic propulsion in a closed tube to accelerate pods at speeds in excess of 700 miles per hour. To put that into context, an average commercial airliner travels at speeds up to 500 miles per hour. Musk’s open source design proposal was floated as a challenge to engineers, largely in response to what he viewed as an outdated, disruption-prone, and costly American rail system.

Many companies are now proposing designs for an upcoming prototype test in January. Bibop Gabriele Gresta, Chief Operating Officer of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, hopes that the project will not only consume less electricity than it produces, allowing for the resale of the excess energy, but will allow the company to recoup its $100-150 million investment within a decade. Now one knows if this untested technology will pan out, but it’s possible that we are about to witness the dawn of the age of the hyperloop.

Looking even further ahead, drones could alter the way we think of inter- and intra-city transportation. It may not be that far-fetched to imagine advances in drone technology that take advantage of underutilized, low altitude airspace in new ways. Drone delivery is exciting, but consider the possibilities of the drone as a low-cost, efficient, and speedy form of transportation.

Advances in battery life, autonomous flight software, and sensor suite technologies could lead to orderly flows of traffic along “highways” in the skies above cities. The energy costs associated with such systems are currently prohibitively expensive. But as energy storage costs continue to decline, and as drone technology continues to develop, we could very well one day find ourselves in a world where regular people commute through the air.

Whether the future of transportation is autonomous, electric, looped, airborne, or some combination of all these is uncertain. What is certain, however, is that whatever form the future of transportation takes, it’s likely to be of immeasurable benefit to ordinary people. To paraphrase Andreessen’s sentiments, the future can’t come soon enough.

This post originally appeared at CapX.

Ryan HagemannRyan Hagemann

Ryan Hagemann is a civil liberties policy analyst at the Niskanen Center.

The Barbarianism of Paternalism by Aaron Ross Powell

Lots of people do lots of things I wish they wouldn’t. And lots of people don’t do lots of things I wish they would. In fact, I’m rather certain the world would be a better place for me and people just like me if more people were willing to go along with my desires and tastes, instead of stubbornly pursuing their own thing.

Take drinking tons of soda. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why people consider sugar water a multiple-times-a-day beverage. It’s like wanting to pour chocolate sauce on everything, or eat brownies with every meal. In short, to my sensibilities, it’s gross. And it’s way less healthy than drinking water — which tastes a whole lot better, too.

Part of being civilized — arguably most of being civilized — is recognizing that different people do things differently and that such differences deserve respect. Respecting difference means allowing behaviors we find disagreeable, provided those behaviors don’t cause us harm. This covers big stuff like religious toleration — those people of other faiths sure do eat weird things and have a funny way of talking, but that’s their business — to, yes, even the dreadful behavior of drinking half-a-dozen Cokes a day.

Of course, civilized people aren’t prevented from making their opinions known. I just did, with my quips about soda, and if I happen to see you drinking one, I’m free to tell you what I think. (Though I risk coming across as an officious jerk if I’m not careful.) What civilized people don’t do is hit each other with clubs over such differences.

That’s why the paternalism Sarah Conly offers three cheers for in the pages of the New York Times amounts to a rah-rah for barbarism. Conly, an assistant professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College and author of Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism, wants those upstanding chaps of the NYPD to flex their might to stop Americans from getting so fat.

To support her preference for state interference, Conly turns to the great classical liberal John Stuart Mill.

In his great work, On Liberty, Mill advances the “harm principle” as a crucial limit on the authority of the state:

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.

Which sounds pretty bad for the soda ban. But not so fast, Conly says. She tells us Mill endorsed preventing our freely chosen actions “when we are acting out of ignorance and doing something we’ll pretty definitely regret. You can stop someone from crossing a bridge that is broken, he said, because you can be sure no one wants to plummet into the river.”

From that, she gets to the idea that, because people underestimate the dangers of drinking lots of soda, they’re (often/usually) acting out of ignorance when they drink it, and so we’re justified in at the very least making it much more difficult for them to consume the stuff in bulk.

But read the full passage from Mill:

If either a public officer or any one else saw a person attempting to cross a bridge which had been ascertained to be unsafe, and there were no time to warn him of his danger, they might seize him and turn him back, without any real infringement of his liberty; for liberty consists in doing what one desires, and he does not desire to fall into the river.

Nevertheless, when there is not a certainty, but only a danger of mischief, no one but the person himself can judge of the sufficiency of the motive which may prompt him to incur the risk: in this case, therefore (unless he is a child, or delirious, or in some state of excitement or absorption incompatible with the full use of the reflecting faculty), he ought, I conceive, to be only warned of the danger; not forcibly prevented from exposing himself to it.

It seems Conly left out the bit about such interference requiring first “no time to warn him of his danger.” Nor does she seem at all bothered by the important limit that, “when there is not a certainty, but only a danger of mischief, no one but the person himself can judge of the sufficiency of the motive which may prompt him to incur the risk.”

Even accounting for the cognitive biases — which Conly says, if only he’d known about them, would’ve led Mill to support soda nannyism — it’s difficult to square the harm caused by a large Coke with the imminent danger and certainty of effect needed to override the harm principle.

In fact, a great deal of On Liberty seems perfectly aimed at exposing the immorality of Conly’s paternalism. She should’ve read not only the rest of that passage, but also the rest of On Liberty. Mill warns of an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the powers of society over the individual, both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation: and as the tendency of all the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen society, and diminish the power of the individual, this encroachment is not one of the evils which tend spontaneously to disappear, but, on the contrary, to grow more and more formidable.

The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power; and as the power is not declining, but growing, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase.

This “mischief” results from that urge to have others prefer the same thing we prefer, to have others behave the way we behave. But, like I said above and like Conly seems to forget, civilization means recognizing the primacy of individual choice, even choices we think silly.

There is no reason that all human existences should be constructed on some one, or some small number of patterns. If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common-sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.

Human beings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not undistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet?

If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate.

The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another. The same mode of life is a healthy excitement to one, keeping all his faculties of action and enjoyment in their best order, while to another it is a distracting burthen, which suspends or crushes all internal life.

Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.

Is drinking large sodas a way of life, though? Conly mocks the idea: “Large cups of soda as symbols of human dignity? Really?” But consider that if you drink 32 ounces of Coca-Cola, you’ll rack up 388 calories. A 20-ounce Iced White Chocolate Mocha from Starbucks has 500. Both aren’t good for you, but the Mocha’s worse. The difference is that the kinds of people who want to use government to save ignorant Americans from the harms of soft drinks are the kinds of people who prefer an Iced White Chocolate Mocha to a Coca-Cola.

That Conly calls for a ban on Cokes and not Mochas indicates that what really bothers her is the behavior of those low-brow folks who slam giant soft drinks, but not so much the worse behavior of the middle-class and educated who just can’t start the day without a latte. About this tendency to use ourselves as the moral yardstick, Mill noted, “our idea of improvement chiefly consists in persuading or forcing other people to be as good as ourselves.”

So the real trouble is people aren’t acting like Conly — or the majority Conly imagines agrees with her — would like them to. Thus it’s time to call in the law. To which Mill says this:

A theory of “social rights,” the like of which probably never before found its way into distinct language — being nothing short of this — that it is the absolute social right of every individual, that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought; that whosoever fails thereof in the smallest particular, violates my social right, and entitles me to demand from the legislature the removal of the grievance.

So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them: for the moment an opinion which I consider noxious, passes any one’s lips, it invades all the “social rights” attributed to me by the Alliance.

The doctrine ascribes to all mankind a vested interest in each other’s moral, intellectual, and even physical perfection, to be defined by each claimant according to his own standard.

To which Conly likely offers another three cheers. Especially when the individual rights she wants violated in the name of social rights are so, well,dumb. “As irritating as it may initially feel, the soda regulation is a good idea,” she writes. “It’s hard to give up the idea of ourselves as completely rational. We feel as if we lose some dignity. But that’s the way it is, and there’s no dignity in clinging to an illusion.”

Writing in The Subjection of Women — regarding a different group then burdened with the charge of irrationality — Mill had this to say about a Conly-style disregard for personal choice: “The yoke is naturally and necessarily humiliating to all persons, except the one who is on the throne, together with, at most, the one who expects to succeed to it.”

Conly may cheer the power of the throne, but the civilized among us should not.

This essay first appeared at Libertarianism.org.

Aaron Ross PowellAaron Ross Powell

Aaron Ross Powell is a research fellow and editor of Libertarianism.org.

Safe Spaces Can’t Be Diverse and Vice Versa by Kevin Currie-Knight

I’m a fan of the LGBT center on the campus where I teach. It offers a space where gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students can be among students, faculty, and staff without fear of harassment, bullying, or negative judgment. There, they do not have to worry about passing (pretending to be straight) or covering (having to signal to others that they are still “normal” despite who they are).

But do you know what spaces like this are not? Diverse.

Or rather, they are not diverse in the types of attitudes permitted to exist there. One cannot, say, believe that homosexuality is a sin and feel welcome at an LGBT center. One cannot believe that transgender people are mentally ill and find LGBT centers to be congenial.

This lack of diversity is not wrong; it is by design and has a good purpose. A safe space is one where people with certain identities that don’t fit in elsewhere can find safety through homogeneity and solidarity.

We don’t need to dismiss either ideal to recognize that a space’s safety and its diversity will be inversely related. The more you have of one, the less you must have of the other.

But you can have spaces and contexts that allow for either ideal, or varying degrees of compromise between them — unless activists succeed in their current quest to convert entire universities into safe spaces.

The Yale case is well known by now. Erika Christakis, a lecturer in early child development, voiced concern in an email to Yale students and residence-life folks urging them to rethink the university’s heavy-handed approach to advising students on which Halloween costumes to avoid. Her note ignited controversy and protest on campus — with some even calling for Christakis’s resignation — because the possibility of students wearing offensive Halloween costumes makes the campus a potentially unsafe space.

In another recent example, the University of Missouri has been experiencing protests regarding alleged racist speech and treatment of minority students. During one of these protests, a journalist trying to cover the event was evidently shouted down and intimidated because his (journalistic) presence at the protest allegedly threatened the protesters’ safe space. (Think about how odd it is to describe the site of a vigorous protest as a safe space).

One journalist described a video of the events as follows:

In the video of Tim Tai trying to carry out his ESPN assignment, I see the most vivid example yet of activists twisting the concept of “safe space” in a most confounding way. They have one lone student surrounded. They’re forcibly preventing him from exercising a civil right. At various points, they intimidate him. Ultimately, they physically push him. But all the while, they are operating on the premise, or carrying on the pretense, that he is making them unsafe.

If people who regularly find their campuses (or other places) to be inhospitable, it may do them good to have social spaces where they are assured some level of relief, probably with people they are comfortable with. But think about what that means for diversity.

Increasing diversity is another aspiration at universities and other organizations, but safe spaces demand that the people in the space have a certain degree of homogeneity. For Yale to be a safe space, the university must disallow a diversity of Halloween costumes.

Why did the Missouri protesters suggest that Tai’s presence threatened to turn their protest into an unsafe space? Because there was a possibility that the narrative this journalist would construct might be one the homogeneous protesters would approve of. Tai threatened the homogeneity and solidarity of the protest.

Let’s go back to the example of LGBT centers. That these students have somewhere they can go where they do not feel pressures to hide or “tone down” their identities is important, and any society that promotes freedom of association will have many such centers, whether official or not. But the only way for an entire university to become a safe space for LGBT students is to sacrifice diversity by, for example, demanding that religious students not believe (at least openly) that homosexuality is sinful. The converse is also true: LGBT centers could no longer function as safe spaces for LGBT students if they became sites of more diversity, where those religious students could regularly voice their beliefs.

Diversity cannot thrive in a world that is one big safe space.

Why? Because diversity means difference. Difference means that people will invariably see things in different ways, and we will sometimes anger each other. It’s not a bug, but a feature. To eliminate the possibility that some of us could deeply offend others of us would be to require everyone to live only in ways acceptable to all.

Diversity means a world where black-power advocates can live openly and in ways that anger white people — and where white-power advocates can live openly and thus anger black people. A world of diversity is one where people with different tastes, comfort levels, and senses of humor can wear Halloween costumes that may offend others.

The best resolution is to allow people on college campuses and elsewhere to create safe spaces. If we believe others’ Halloween costumes may deeply offend us, or that people may say derogatory and racist things to us, we can go to one of those spaces. But leave the university as a diverse space — don’t force it to become a safe space.

Diversity and emotional safety are values at odds with each other. They can coexist in tension, but the expansion of one can only come at the expense of the other.

Kevin Currie-KnightKevin Currie-Knight
Kevin Currie-Knight teaches in East Carolina University’s Department of Special Education, Foundations, and Research. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

PODCAST: Pakistani Terrorist Camps in the United States

Listen to this podcast of the January 3, 2016 Lisa Benson Show on KKNT 960 AM Radio – The Patriot. Lisa Benson and New English Review Senior Editor Jerry Gordon co-hosted this show with the assistance of Board of Advisers member, Richard Cutting.

Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser of the American Foundation of Islam and Democracy and the U.S. Commission for international religious discussed the recently launched Freedom Muslim Reform Movement, the deteriorating situation inside Syria and U.S. failure to contend with NATO ally Turkey under Islamist President Erdogan in the war against ISIS.

Shoshana Bryen, senior director of the Washington, D.C.-based Jewish Policy Center, addressed allegations in a recent Wall Street Journal expose of NSA spying on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, U.S. Congressional Members and American Jewish leaders, Israeli preparedness against ISIS threats in Syria and the Sinai and the tacit cooperation with Egypt and the fascinating understanding struck with Putin’s Russia to contain Hezbollah. We will be posting Bryen’s written responses to these and other questions, separately.

Jamaat ul-Fuqra fbi

FBI agents embracing members of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a Pakistani based terrorist group in the United States.

Ryan Mauro, National Security Analyst at The Clarion Project addressed the terrorist training camps established in both Canada and America by radical Pakistani Sufi Sheik Mubarak ali Gilani, who has not been investigated by the FBI despite his founding a network of Jamaat ul-Fuqra/Muslim of America (MOA) paramilitary camps in both Canada and the U.S. that conveyed extremist Islamist ideology and provided weapons training for prison converts to Islam. These MOA camps fostered a three decade record of attempted assassinations, criminal activities supporting terrorism akin to that of the perpetrators of the San Bernardino massacres. Yet, as Mauro pointed out, Sheik Gilani does not support ISIS.

Our usually astute European listener had these comments on the January 3, 2016 Lisa Benson Show:

To hear Dr. Jasser state the plan to reform the religion of Islam was very interesting. The Sharia Islamic law actually promoted by Sunni Islam is both political and religious. For these extremists their ideology requires them to conquer the world and forcefully ask all the non-Muslims to convert to Islam or become third class citizens of their caliphate.

What Dr. Jasser is proposing is to separate religion state from religion in Islam. A modernized religious law will take a lot of time.  However, this is the only way to advance eliminating extremist Islam from all around the world. Dr. Jasser should not call this reform a new Sharia law, but the New Moslem Religious law. The word Sharia has another meaning for all Moslems. It will be interesting to watch how many mosques and Imams would adopt Dr. Jasser’s propositions because many are still funded by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Moslem Brotherhood. Let us not forget that Muslim Brotherhood/CAIR members have been engaged by the Administration in such policy considerations.

Dr. Jasser has to be congratulated for the dangerous and wonderful work he is doing.

Wonderful to hear Shoshana Bryen giving her opinion and analysis. The Israelis know that they are being tapped and they know quite well what encryption services they can use for their communications which are Top Secret. Shoshana knows all about what is going on and she writes about it explicitly.

The details that Ryan Mauro provided are diagnostic of the chronic illness of these Islamist Muslim of America camps.  It is unbelievable that the FBI, even with limited resources, has not taken the necessary steps to indict all those who are embedded in these groups. I sincerely hope that there will not be a major terror attack in the US perpetrated by members of these Islamist camps.

I think the radio show is really getting better and better. The American public needs to hear these comments to wake up and contact their law makers in order to have a safe America.

EDITORS NOTE: This podcast originally appeared in the New English Review.

National Security Agency: Spying on American Jews, Israel and the U.S. Congress

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director at the Washington, D.C. based Jewish Policy Center.  She has been a frequent guest on The Lisa Benson Show regarding US-Israel relations, the Obama Administration and national security.  On the first program of the New Year, January 3, 2016, she appeared  to address allegations raised by a Wall Street Journal article about NSA spying on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and by happenstance, Members of Congress and American Jewish leaders, “US Spy Net  on Israel Snares Congress. “  She also responded to an NER Iconoclast post on whether the Israel Defense Force was prepared to meet the threat of ISIS affiliates on both the Syrian frontier and the Egyptian Sinai. She also spoke of an emerging relationship with Putin’s Russia allowing Israeli freedom to attack Hezbollah targets in Syria.

Listen to the segment with Bryen on the Benson show Podcast of January 3, 2016 starting at the 20 minute mark:

As is our practice in producing the weekly Benson Show, we send our guests a set of suggested questions requesting they select a limited number to respond in what a fast is paced packed 44 minutes.  Bryen prepared written responses to the original of set of questions. Below are her astute and illuminating responses.

What is real story behind the Wall Street Journal report alleging NSA spying on Israeli PM Netanyahu, Congressional members and American Jewish Leaders?

Bryen:  The administration was spying on Congress; maybe still is.  The White House tried to put a layer of protection between itself and illegal NSA activity by saying “do what you want.” If there was a problem or a lawsuit over this, the White House position wouldn’t hold up. NSA was spying on Israel and vice versa – nothing new.

The real targets were Congress and American Jews. I don’t see that Congress knew about this specific spying. Surely no one up there is naive and they know they are listened to. This is important for the next points. That makes the idea that they would get on the phone with Israeli Ambassador to US Ron Dermer and allow him to bribe them over the wire totally ridiculous. Whatever NSA got, they did not get it from tapping Dermer’s phone. They probably also did not get it from tapping Congressional phones because Congress assumes it is tapped and no one was discussing bribery.  What could you bribe a Congressman with to get his/her vote on this?

There was no collusion between Ron Dermer and the American Jewish community. I was part of the machinations opposing the nuclear deal with Iran, although the Jewish Policy Center does not lobby; we are only in the information business. “The Jews” knew their talking points and didn’t need Dermer for anything. If they talked to him, that is one thing.  However, needing him for “talking points,” again, that is ridiculous. If there are intercepts of American Jews talking to Congressional members it would have to come from bugging Congress. Lee Smith, of The Weekly Standard makes the point that if there was bribery or attempted bribery involved, there would already be criminal cases. There are none, of course. So, where does that leave us?

NSA spying is only supposed to be done for issues of National Security. One can make the argument that if the US government thought Israel was going to bomb Iran, it would rise to that level. However by 2013, the US was positive Israel was not going to do that. What comes after is political.

Are the enemies of the White House are Congress and the Jews? Congress because Obama knew it opposed the deal. That is why the talks needed to be secret. Also, the talks leading to the talks needed to be secret. They were worried that Israel would spill the beans. Israel didn’t.

There were several incidents in which the Administration let people know what the problems were.  Lee Smith points in his article to a Jon Stewart interview with the President. There is also The New York Times (NYT) editorial that accused Jews of being more loyal to a foreign government than to the US. Senators Schumer and Menendez were damned as “beholden to donors” – code word for Jews.

Obama told Stewart: “If people are engaged, eventually the political system responds. Despite the money, despite the lobbyists, it still responds.” Stewart said, “What do you mean by lobbyists?” The President didn’t answer, but after the signing of the JCPOA, he said Congress would evaluate this agreement fairly, “not based on lobbying, but based on what is in the national interests of the United States of America.”

The NYT reported on a Democratic Issues Conference in Baltimore where the President said he understood the pressures that senators face from “donors and others.” However, according to the NYT, Obama urged the lawmakers to “take the long view rather than make a move for short-term political gain,” meaning money and Jewish support. Menendez was offended.

Smith actually thinks there was no specific bugging going on, but just an attempt to intimidate Congress and the Jews. I disagree.  They think they are above the law on these things. And they may be, but it doesn’t appear to matter.

Why are media accusations unfounded that American Jewish leaders and U.S. Congressional friends of Israel take their cues from the Israeli Embassy?

Bryen:   Because those accusations presume American Jews NEED someone to tell them how they are supposed to feel about a political issue. On its face that is ant-Semitic. American Jews are a sophisticated community of Americans – although I have some disagreements with where they come out on some issues – they don’t need anyone, particularly a foreign government, to tell them what to think or what to do about issues.

Have these disclosures impacted on US- Israel intelligence cooperation and weapons deliveries to maintain Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge?

Bryen:  No, there is no present impact that I can discern. First, all intelligence agencies assume that they are being spied on by both friends and enemies. It’s nothing new. Second, the relationship works both ways – the American intelligence services rely on Israel for information in the region.

What options does Congress have to bar lifting sequestered funds of Iran now that the Administration announced delays in new sanctions in view of Iran’s violation of ballistic missile testing under UN Resolutions?

They’re talking about new sanctions laws in Congress after the holiday recess. Note that Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) is the loudest voice on this. He voted FOR the JCPOA and he’s figured out that the deal was a disaster and Secretary Kerry’s “snapback sanctions” were a joke.

Congress can pass any law it wants – sanctions included. Iran’s public interpretation of the deal is that any new sanctions would violate the JCPOA and leave Iran free to withdraw from it – or actually, continue to violate it. The White House appears to be siding with Iran including on the secure visa procedure, which is absolutely an obligation of Congress. Iran remains on the State Sponsor of Terror list because of its support for Hezbollah and Hamas. If the White House does not want more sanctions, it will threaten a veto.  Then you will have the extraordinary spectacle of a U.S. government shielding the world’s top sponsor of terror from the United States Congress.

How prepared is the IDF to contend with threats from ISIS in both Syria and the Sinai?

Bryen:  Israel is in a continual state of readiness.  For years they have had to closely identify and track the threats. They are helped by the determination of Egypt in Sinai – with which the US government should be thrilled. It is the actual implementation of the Camp David Accords. The problem for the US in the Sinai is that we have the Multilateral Force and Observers there – MFO – primarily manned by Americans. It is a holdover from Camp David designed to ensure that the Egyptians don’t move military equipment into Sinai in quantities larger than Camp David permitted. Now it is a target for ISIS and affiliated Bedouin groups.

Israel is helped on the northern front by the fact that at the moment neither the Assad government nor Hezbollah wants to open another front and Russia would not permit it. The Israel-Russia relationship is fascinating.  It is mutually beneficial right now and has the seeds of longer-lasting cooperation.

As for ISIS, while in theory killing Jews would be fine, it doesn’t need a second front either. There is a growing threat of ISIS-inspired organizations on the Syrian border, where multiple local factions have pledged allegiance to ISIS leadership. The more immediate risk, however, is most likely related to ISIS’ possible impact on Israeli Arab youth, both within Israel and in Judea and Samaria.

Given the latest killings of Israelis in Tel Aviv by an Israel Arab, what can the Netanyahu government do to prevent such deadly attacks?

Bryen: We don’t’ have all the information, including whether or not it was actually terrorism. It didn’t have the usual “fingerprints.”  The perpetrator was an Israeli Arab citizen who had served five years for a previous attack on an IDF solider. He used a firearm deliberately hitting two people, not spraying the restaurant for maximum casualties. The attack was in the heart of Tel Aviv and he fled the scene.  Israeli Police hedged on whether it was simply a criminal act. If it was a terrorist, it appears to be of the “lone wolf” variety, which means Israel has the same problem the U.S. does.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

VIDEO: The Democrat’s ‘War Against Free Speech’

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Robert Spencer Moment with Robert Spencer, the Director of JihadWatch.org and the author of the new book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS.

I discussed: House Democrats Go to War Against Free Speech, unveiling why H. Res. 569 is so dangerous.

And make sure to watch the very special Robert Spencer Moment: The Criminalization of Dissent, in which Robert reveals how those who reject establishment views are coming under increased law enforcement scrutiny: Click Here.

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EDITORS NOTE: The Glazov Gang is a fan-generated program. Readers my donate through their Pay Pal account, subscribe to their YouTube Channel and LIKE them on Facebook.

About That Fortune Article on Common Core…

I have been reading Peter Elkind’s January 01, 2016, article in Fortune on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

Elkind’s work is a study in foolishness. Basically, he demonstrates the unfounded faith that powerful individuals whose lives only skirt the worlds of whose with children in public schools have placed in a set of rushed, contrived standards to cure all that ails American public education. Whether such ailments are real or contrived becomes irrelevant; CCSS is the needed fix.

Nevertheless, truth regarding CCSS leaks out from among Elkind’s words. Consider this statement in regards to billionaire Bill Gates’ trying to convince billionaire Charles Koch to support CCSS (a failed effort on Gates’ part):

This extraordinary tête-à-tête is just one example of how the war over Common Core has personally engaged—and bedeviled—some of America’s most powerful business leaders. Hugely controversial, it has thrust executives into the uncomfortable intersection of business and politics.

CCSS is hugely controversial, if for no other reason than its rushed-and-hushed creation. And surely one must wonder about the motives behind Gates’ continued push of what is little more than a Gates latest-and-greatest pet project.

Had CCSS been developed and implemented with sense– one grade level at a time, openly, and prior to any formal state adoption– the “hugely controversial” component would have been quelled.

Elkind does not mention this. Instead, he shows that CCSS is very much a corporate tool– a magic tool that is supposed to serve their corporations by contorting the purpose of education into corporate service:

In truth, Common Core might not exist without the corporate community. The nation’s business establishment has been clamoring for more rigorous education standards—ones that would apply across the entire nation—for years. It views them as desperately needed to prepare America’s future workforce and to bolster its global competitiveness. One measure of the deep involvement of corporate leaders: The Common Core standards were drafted by determining the skills that businesses (and colleges) need and then working backward to decide what students should learn.

CCSS: “working backward.” Truer words….

Surely a sensible business community absorbed with serving itself would have required proof that CCSS would deliver on its claim of “college and career readiness.” But no. Business jumped right into selling CCSS– with the likes of Exxon’s Rex Tillerson so enamored with CCSS that he even threatened to not do business with states that did not have CCSS. (As Elkind notes, Tillerson is currently satisfied that CCSS is so embedded in American education that he rescinded his bizarre threat.)

When one is in love, sensibility becomes irrelevant. The CCSS violins in Tillerson’s ears must be proof enough of its faithfulness.

“Businesses say they can’t find enough skilled workers,” reports Elkind.

What board meeting involved any CCSS promoter (David Coleman? Chester Finn?) offering details on exactly how CCSS translates into “enough skilled workers”?

Those pushing CCSS also be required to guarantee its implementation. But they can’t because, well, it is just not that easy.

Elkind mentions the “executive mindset… favors consistency, efficiency, and accountability.” What he also hints at it that the executive mindset assumes that it is right– that it has the right to “insist” on how an issue should be– any issue that captures that executive’s attention. Yes, CCSS has captured that attention, and executives like Tillerson want American education to be accountable to their perceptions of how American education should work– even as such ivory-towered power-wielders overlook the glaring reality that CCSS is, as Elkind points out, a “grand experiment”:

It remains unclear how well this grand experiment will meet its ultimate goal: better preparing kids (and our country) for a challenging future.

You just can’t drop an education reform from the top and expect it to work on the local level as willed by the top. It will be resisted, and it will be gamed. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) offered that lesson. And CCSS will too– even as it is excused for not being “properly implemented.”

And to think that CCSS would work if only America just relaxed about the appendaged CCSS testing is plain ignorant:

A key element of the Common Core effort—common standardized tests to allow honest assessments of progress—remains unfulfilled, swept back by a wave of parental concern about over-testing and teacher anxiety about being judged too harshly too soon.

Elkind, when you can produce for me a major testing company willing to guarantee that its student assessments are able to accurately grade teachers and schools, then you can toss off commentary about “honest assessment” with no beef from me. However, the reality is that students are being over-tested, and much of it has to do with grading teachers and schools– which will never be a valid use of a student achievement test.

So, as a teacher, I will tell you that CCSS and the attendant assessment craze in which it was birthed will only perpetuate opportunities to game a system imposed from the top to smother the bottom into some flaky, cognac-at-the-club-induced illusion of globally-competitive submission.

The likes of CCSS will fail, not because of poor implementation, but because it will collapse under the foolishness of its own ill-conceived weight. Indeed,Fortune magazine is willing to accept the word of Chester Finn– whose Fordham Institution promoted CCSS even though it conceded that standards in some other states were better–regarding the state of CCSS:

“We’re better off than we were before Common Core,” says veteran education scholar Chester Finn, a senior fellow with Stanford’s Hoover Institution. “We’ve got better standards. There’s less lying about the performance of kids and schools. There’s some better curriculum in place. If you were hoping for a 100% gain, today we’re probably looking at a 37% gain. But honestly it’s still early days. The aircraft carrier of an education system turns really slowly.”

If you want to see some lying in the form of pro-CCSS marketing, read Finn’s July 2010 review of state standards and CCSS. Finn proves that creative writing is very much alive in association with CCSS.

As for that “37 percent gain”– I wonder if any of the CCSS corporate pushers will finally decide to follow through on their supposed mindset of accountability and ask for the hard proof behind Finn’s marshmallow stat– and whether they will pin him down on exactly how long that aircraft carrier takes to turn.

EDITORS NOTE: The author has written A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who In the Implosion of American Public Education. She also has a second book, Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?. If you don’t care to buy from Amazon you may purchase her books directly from Powell’s City of Books. The featured image is courtesy of Fortune Magazine.

Trump and the Black Vote

The year 2015 brought tectonic changes in several areas of our lives that the media has totally ignored or under-reported.  Too often media, both left and right, only talk to people who view the world from the same prism as they do.

The same argument can be made about the political establishment from both parties.  There is a total disconnect between the establishment of both parties and their respective bases.  This disconnect is personified in the presidential candidacies of both businessman Donald Trump and Independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

To this end, the Republican establishment is by far the biggest loser of 2015.

They told Republican voters that if they raised and contributed money to help them gain control of congress, they would shrink the size of government, defund Obama’s amnesty for illegals, and stop these trade deals that would subjugate America’s sovereignty to international organizations.

We helped Republicans to gain control of congress and then they quickly began to do the moonwalk on every issue they promised us they would fight for.

Then along comes Donald Trump launching his presidential campaign based on all the promises the Republican congress made and broke.  The Republican congress created Donald Trump’s candidacy.

Now the same Republican establishment that created Trump is actively trying to destroy and sabotage his campaign.  Message to the establishment:  Trump is not the problem. Republican voters don’t want amnesty for illegals, they don’t want increased debt ceilings, they don’t want more H1-B visas, they don’t want all these trade deals, they don’t want more continuing resolutions (CRs); and they don’t want omnibus budget bills passed, just to name a few.

However impolitic you may think Trump’s verbiage is; he makes voters believe he is sincere in what he says.  He projects strength and leadership and has proven that he is willing to take it hard to Bill & Hillary Clinton.

Trump has the uncanny ability to connect with the average voter and tap into what they are feeling at any given moment.  Most of the other candidates wait on polls to tell them what to think and what to believe; but Trump somehow always seems to just instinctively know what is going on within the electorate.

If the establishment would spend more time fighting for the values that they campaigned on; there would be no Trump candidacy.

Trump is totally rewriting the playbook on how to run for president.  He is the only candidate to actively engage with the Black community in any meaningful way during the primary. He has even gone so far as to hire Blacks and then put them on TV representing his campaign.  WOW, what a novel thought!

Because of Trump’s business background, I think he understands that the Black community is open to a message of economic empowerment; I think he understands how to penetrate or create a new market, i.e. the Black vote.

Most of the other candidates are too busy listening to their pollsters and other establishment figures tell them that going after the Black vote is a waste of time.

As I have written repeatedly, Blacks are looking for the Republican Party to give them a reason to vote for them, but only Trump has even remotely began to see this possibility.

Republicans have absolutely no idea of the chasm that exists between Blacks and Hillary Clinton.  She doesn’t have the connection to Blacks like Bill Clinton and to a lesser extent, Barak Obama.

She will attempt to scare Blacks into voting for her by telling them that Republicans are racists, etc., etc., etc.  She will also pay Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to do their dirty work for her.

Hillary has no substantive track record to take to the Black community.  She shows up for all the right symbolic events in the Black community, but has done nothing of any substance.

She insults the Black community by equating homosexual entitlements to Civil Rights.  She supports amnesty for illegals though everyone knows it will devastate the Black community.

The real sign of what these Republican presidential candidates think about the Black vote will be shown in two weeks when the nation celebrates Martin Luther King’s birthday on January 18.

If a candidate only issues a perfunctory press statement, then you know that campaign is not serious about the Black vote.

Each campaign should do an event on King’s birthday within the Black community and give a major policy speech on their vision for Civil Rights should they become president.

I will be stunned if any campaign does anything substantive on King’s holiday.

In order for any Republican to win the White House, he will have to think outside the box and be able to get at least 15% of the Black vote.

The only person I see willing to invest the time, money and effort to do this is Donald Trump.

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Donald Trump Starts 2016 with a Bang — Launches First Campaign Ad

Here is Donald Trump’s first official campaign ad for television.

Donald Trump dropped his first television ad this week, reiterating his commitment to fight Islamic terrorism, defeat the Islamic State, and secure America’s borders.

Please watch it and let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Chilling Islamic State Video: Five ‘Spies’ Brutally Slaughtered

A new Islamic State video surfaced purporting to show the execution of five British spies.

The 10-minute video features a masked man with a British accent who calls the video “a message to David Cameron.”

He calls Cameron “Slave of the White House; Mule of the Jews,” mocking the British contribution to the war effort as insignificant.

He says the Islamic State will remain and “will continue to wage jihad, break borders and one day invade your land, where we will rule by the sharia.”

The executioner then says Britain will lose the war, as it lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, before shooting the captives. At the start of the video each captive gave a video confession detailing his alleged crimes in Arabic.

The video concludes with a young boy saying “we are going to kill thekuffar over there.”

British security services are currently examining the content of the video, which has not been independently verified. The British government has not made any comment as to the presence of British spies inside Islamic State territory.

The BBC reported unnamed experts as saying the video was made to distract from recent Islamic State losses on the battlefield, such as the capture of Ramadi by the Iraqi security forces.

WARNING: Click here for an edited version of the video which contains graphic images.

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