Politics Archives - Page 1090 of 1717

VIDEO: You Have Little Faith – Trust The Plan

January 27, 2019/in Elections, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by John Michael Chambers

Based on what I see on social media as well as the many people who have reached out to me, I must say that I am somewhat surprised that there seems to be a number of people who believe that President Trump has caved on both the wall negotiations and the most recent opening of the government based on the prepared speech given by the President. I see it differently. You have little faith. Change the channel and trust the plan.

Bait #1

From the executive branch comes the olive branch. Democrats shoot themselves in the foot.

While others are off vacationing in Hawaii and Puerto Rico refusing to meet and negotiate with the President, Trump positioned as not only willing to negotiate, but offering the Democrats much of what they have wanted all along such as:

Three years of legislative relief for some 700,000 recipients of the Obama-era initiative known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which protects some immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children from deportation. The Trump administration had moved to end DACA, but the decision was challenged in court and is currently held up in legal proceedings. Trump’s proposal would give an extension of legal status
A three-year extension of Temporary Protected Status for some 300,000 facing expiration
A mechanism to allow Central American minors to apply for asylum in their home countries
And more…

So what do the Democrats with Pelosi and Schumer at the helm do? They refuse to budge. From the executive branch comes the olive branch. Democrats shoot themselves in the foot.

Bait #2

From the executive branch comes the olive branch. Democrats, I believe, will once again shoot themselves in the foot.

President Trump then ends the longest government shutdown on record and reopens the government with promises to get all back pay to the 800,000+ furloughed federal employees. In doing so, he gains favor from some of them as an added benefit.

Trump stated in his recent speech, that we have no choice but to build a wall as part of other measures, to protect our border. The President stated the re-opening will be for just three weeks with a deadline for Congress of February 15, 2019. If a deal is not agreed upon, President Trump stated clearly that he will exercise the powers afforded to the President, both legally and constitutionally, to see that the border wall is in fact built. This leaves two possible choices come February 15, 2019; declaring another government shutdown or the declaration of a national state of emergency which will allow the President to procure the funds without approval from congress, and begin building the wall. In this event, we can rest assured this will be fought out in the courts as well.

M&M’s

I wrote about the real reason for the border backlash and it is all politically motivated as outlined in this recent article, “Illegal Immigration and the Cost of Stupidity“. So we can clearly see, this is not about the three M’s.

* Morals

* Money

* Manufactured

Walls are moral when you look at the success rate of walls throughout the world, walls are preventing crimes, preventing murder and rape, child trafficking, terrorism, drugs, economic hardship and so on. Has nothing to do with money. This requires no further comment. Read the article in the above link to prove my point. And of course any clear thinking honest individual knows the crisis is not manufactured. It has been a crisis for decades which is why Clinton, Bush and Obama are all on the record talking about a border crisis. Only difference is they did nothing but make it worse.

Pelosi and the Italian Mamma

Pelosi and Schumer along with the Democrats are now cornered. Trump has positioned himself as a patient, tolerant leader, willing to bring both parties together to negotiate as clearly seen in Bait #1 above. Then Pelosi (recently stuck on the bus due to her grounded flight by the President) :), has been Trumped once again. They will own the mess. The wall will be built. Carry on “peeps”. Next battle…

It reminds me of my Mother. You know in the old days, back in N.Y. where the Italian Mamma is cooking sauce on a Sunday morning. She takes the spaghetti from the boiling pot and throws it up against the cabinet to see if it sticks. If it sticks, it is cooked and ready to be served. Well, since June of 2016 we have seen the left and deep state throw a lot of spaghetti around, only thing is… nothing sticks!

The President’s final words in the recent speech were, “we will have great security”. Take him on his word. And so we will. And in my opinion it will end up with the declaration of a National State of Emergency. We shall see. Tic-toc…

RELATED ARTICLE: The President Blinked. Will Democrats Fail?

EDITORS NOTE: This column with video and images is republished with permission.

VIDEO: Generously Offending Since 1776

January 27, 2019/in Culture War, Policy, Politics, Video/by Bill Finlay

Some people just aren’t happy unless they have something to be offended about. We say offend them with the right things.

EDITORS NOTE: This video is republished with permission. The featured image is courtesy of David Hoskins on Pinerest.

Venezuelans Stand on the Edge of History

January 27, 2019/in Culture War, Featured, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Venezuelans took to the streets across their country Wednesday to protest the beginning of a second term for President Nicolás Maduro.

Following years of famine, the decimation of savings, and the destruction of a once-leading Latin American economy, tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets across their country Wednesday to protest the beginning of a second term for President Nicolás Maduro.

Maduro was reelected in May 2018 in what many, including the Atlantic Council and The New York Times, have called a “sham election,” with the lowest voter turnout in Venezuela’s modern history.

The People Have Had Enough

Protesters aim to force Maduro’s resignation so that new elections may be held. Speaking on the street before a camera and holding a Venezuelan flag, one woman addressed Maduro directly: “Understand it, sir: Venezuela has outgrown you!”

Maduro’s socialist ruling party was first swept to power by his predecessor Hugo Chavez in 1998 following Chavez’s unsuccessful violent overthrow of the Venezuelan government six years before. Since then, this movement has orchestrated government takeovers of various parts of Venezuelan society that used to be in the hands of individuals, most notably the country’s productive oil sector. The extreme shortages of basic goods and services that resulted from these destructive policy choices made life difficult for everyday Venezuelans without connections to those in the government. Compounded by an inflation rate expected to reach 10,000,000 percent this year, the Venezuelan standard of living has plummeted. Where the median Venezuelan monthly income is only $8, a two-pound bag of onions costs $2.

Once Latin America’s “breadbasket,” Venezuela is now famished.

Leading into Wednesday’s protests, Venezuelan opposition leader and president of the National Assembly Juan Guaidó declared himself to be Venezuela’s interim president. He was recognized quickly by the US, various international groups, and at least four other Latin American countries.

“We will stay on the street until Venezuela is liberated,” declared Mr. Guaidó.

Given the government’s violent response to previous shows of opposition, it is no stretch to say that Mr. Guaidó and every protester is risking everything to try to escape the tyrannical rule.

Socialism Has Taken Its Toll

Venezuela’s current state is due directly to the mentalities of Chavez and Maduro and their belief in “economic war” to right the wrongs that hurt people daily. Their approach to see economic and social problems as a condition to solve with policy weapons (and actual weapons against those who do not fall in line) has produced only misery, sickness, and death.

Former FEE intern Jorge Jraissati tells his country’s heartbreaking story in a hit video released just last year. Jorge describes the crime, poverty, and fear resulting from the relentless warfare the Venezuelan government has waged on the Venezuelan people.

We at FEE stand with the people inside and outside of Venezuela who are working to bring freedom to every person in Venezuela. But we’re not naive to the realities or dangers of the situation.

Maduro could use the crisis to crush the opposition and consolidate power further. There’s the potential of bloody civil war or the ascension of a right-wing tyrant in the mold of Pinochet. International tensions could escalate.

Yet, on one point, we’re certain: the brave people on the streets of Caracas and every city in Venezuela deserve the chance to plot their own destiny, and we hope today is the beginning of the end of their long suffering.

COLUMN BY

Richard N. Lorenc

Richard N. Lorenc is FEE’s Executive Vice President and serves as managing director of FEE’s Youth Education and Audience Research (“YEAR”) project to develop and promote new content and distribution techniques for free-market ideas.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column with images is republished with permission. Image credit: Wikipedia

VIDEO: In a Plot To Blast Trump, the AP Accidentally Exposes the Failures of “May Issue” Permits

January 26, 2019/in Courts & Law, Gun Rights, Policy, Politics, Regulation, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by NRA Institute for Legislative Action

“This idea of ‘May Issue’ is offensive, and the Associated Press just unknowingly made a great case why may issue should be ruled unconstitutional.” —Grant Stinchfield

Kirsten Gillibrand Is a Hypocrite and a Fraud on Gun Rights

Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

January 26, 2019/in Culture War, Healthcare, Must Read, Policy, Politics, Science, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Imprimis Digest

Alex Berenson
Author, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

Alex Berenson is a graduate of Yale University with degrees in history and economics. He began his career in journalism in 1994 as a business reporter for the Denver Post, joined the financial news website TheStreet.com in 1996, and worked as an investigative reporter for The New York Timesfrom 1999 to 2010, during which time he also served two stints as an Iraq War correspondent. In 2006 he published The Faithful Spy, which won the 2007 Edgar Award for best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America. He has published ten additional novels and two nonfiction books, The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate Americaand Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on January 15, 2019, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C.

Seventy miles northwest of New York City is a hospital that looks like a prison, its drab brick buildings wrapped in layers of fencing and barbed wire. This grim facility is called the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Institute. It’s one of three places the state of New York sends the criminally mentally ill—defendants judged not guilty by reason of insanity.

Until recently, my wife Jackie—Dr. Jacqueline Berenson—was a senior psychiatrist there. Many of Mid-Hudson’s 300 patients are killers and arsonists. At least one is a cannibal. Most have been diagnosed with psychotic disorders like schizophrenia that provoked them to violence against family members or strangers.

A couple of years ago, Jackie was telling me about a patient. In passing, she said something like, Of course he’d been smoking pot his whole life.

Of course? I said.

Yes, they all smoke.

So marijuana causes schizophrenia?

I was surprised, to say the least. I tended to be a libertarian on drugs. Years before, I’d covered the pharmaceutical industry for The New York Times. I was aware of the claims about marijuana as medicine, and I’d watched the slow spread of legalized cannabis without much interest.

Jackie would have been within her rights to say, I know what I’m talking about, unlike you. Instead she offered something neutral like, I think that’s what the big studies say. You should read them.

So I did. The big studies, the little ones, and all the rest. I read everything I could find. I talked to every psychiatrist and brain scientist who would talk to me. And I soon realized that in all my years as a journalist I had never seen a story where the gap between insider and outsider knowledge was so great, or the stakes so high.

I began to wonder why—with the stocks of cannabis companies soaring and politicians promoting legalization as a low-risk way to raise tax revenue and reduce crime—I had never heard the truth about marijuana, mental illness, and violence.

Over the last 30 years, psychiatrists and epidemiologists have turned speculation about marijuana’s dangers into science. Yet over the same period, a shrewd and expensive lobbying campaign has pushed public attitudes about marijuana the other way. And the effects are now becoming apparent.

Almost everything you think you know about the health effects of cannabis, almost everything advocates and the media have told you for a generation, is wrong.

They’ve told you marijuana has many different medical uses. In reality marijuana and THC, its active ingredient, have been shown to work only in a few narrow conditions. They are most commonly prescribed for pain relief. But they are rarely tested against other pain relief drugs like ibuprofen—and in July, a large four-year study of patients with chronic pain in Australia showed cannabis use was associated with greater pain over time.

They’ve told you cannabis can stem opioid use—“Two new studies show how marijuana can help fight the opioid epidemic,” according to Wonkblog, a Washington Post website, in April 2018— and that marijuana’s effects as a painkiller make it a potential substitute for opiates. In reality, like alcohol, marijuana is too weak as a painkiller to work for most people who truly needopiates, such as terminal cancer patients. Even cannabis advocates, like Rob Kampia, the co-founder of the Marijuana Policy Project, acknowledge that they have always viewed medical marijuana laws primarily as a way to protect recreational users.

As for the marijuana-reduces-opiate-use theory, it is based largely on a single paper comparing overdose deaths by state before 2010 to the spread of medical marijuana laws— and the paper’s finding is probably a result of simple geographic coincidence. The opiate epidemic began in Appalachia, while the first states to legalize medical marijuana were in the West. Since 2010, as both the epidemic and medical marijuana laws have spread nationally, the finding has vanished. And the United States, the Western country with the most cannabis use, also has by far the worst problem with opioids.

Research on individual users—a better way to trace cause and effect than looking at aggregate state-level data—consistently shows that marijuana use leads to other drug use. For example, a January 2018 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry showed that people who used cannabis in 2001 were almost three times as likely to use opiates three years later, even after adjusting for other potential risks.

Most of all, advocates have told you that marijuana is not just safe for people with psychiatric problems like depression, but that it is a potential treatment for those patients. On its website, the cannabis delivery service Eaze offers the “Best Marijuana Strains and Products for Treating Anxiety.” “How Does Cannabis Help Depression?” is the topic of an article on Leafly, the largest cannabis website. But a mountain of peer-reviewed research in top medical journals shows that marijuana can cause or worsen severe mental illness, especially psychosis, the medical term for a break from reality. Teenagers who smoke marijuana regularly are about three times as likely to develop schizophrenia, the most devastating psychotic disorder.

After an exhaustive review, the National Academy of Medicine found in 2017 that “cannabis use is likely to increase the risk of developing schizophrenia and other psychoses; the higher the use, the greater the risk.” Also that “regular cannabis use is likely to increase the risk for developing social anxiety disorder.”

Over the past decade, as legalization has spread, patterns of marijuana use—and the drug itself—have changed in dangerous ways.

Legalization has not led to a huge increase in people using the drug casually. About 15 percent of Americans used cannabis at least once in 2017, up from ten percent in 2006, according to a large federal study called the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. (By contrast, about 65 percent of Americans had a drink in the last year.) But the number of Americans who use cannabis heavily is soaring. In 2006, about three million Americans reported using cannabis at least 300 times a year, the standard for daily use. By 2017, that number had nearly tripled, to eight million, approaching the twelve million Americans who drank alcohol every day. Put another way, one in 15 drinkers consumed alcohol daily; about one in five marijuana users used cannabis that often.

Cannabis users today are also consuming a drug that is far more potent than ever before, as measured by the amount of THC—delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical in cannabis responsible for its psychoactive effects—it contains. In the 1970s, the last time this many Americans used cannabis, most marijuana contained less than two percent THC. Today, marijuana routinely contains 20 to 25 percent THC, thanks to sophisticated farming and cloning techniques—as well as to a demand by users for cannabis that produces a stronger high more quickly. In states where cannabis is legal, many users prefer extracts that are nearly pure THC. Think of the difference between near-beer and a martini, or even grain alcohol, to understand the difference.

These new patterns of use have caused problems with the drug to soar. In 2014, people who had diagnosable cannabis use disorder, the medical term for marijuana abuse or addiction, made up about 1.5 percent of Americans. But they accounted for eleven percent of all the psychosis cases in emergency rooms—90,000 cases, 250 a day, triple the number in 2006. In states like Colorado, emergency room physicians have become experts on dealing with cannabis-induced psychosis.

Cannabis advocates often argue that the drug can’t be as neurotoxic as studies suggest, because otherwise Western countries would have seen population-wide increases in psychosis alongside rising use. In reality, accurately tracking psychosis cases is impossible in the United States. The government carefully tracks diseases like cancer with central registries, but no such registry exists for schizophrenia or other severe mental illnesses.

On the other hand, research from Finland and Denmark, two countries that track mental illness more comprehensively, shows a significant increase in psychosis since 2000, following an increase in cannabis use. And in September of last year, a large federal survey found a rise in serious mental illness in the United States as well, especially among young adults, the heaviest users of cannabis.

According to this latter study, 7.5 percent of adults age 18-25 met the criteria for serious mental illness in 2017, double the rate in 2008. What’s especially striking is that adolescents age 12-17 don’t show these increases in cannabis use and severe mental illness.

A caveat: this federal survey doesn’t count individual cases, and it lumps psychosis with other severe mental illness. So it isn’t as accurate as the Finnish or Danish studies. Nor do any of these studies prove that rising cannabis use has caused population-wide increases in psychosis or other mental illness. The most that can be said is that they offer intriguing evidence of a link.

Advocates for people with mental illness do not like discussing the link between schizophrenia and crime. They fear it will stigmatize people with the disease. “Most people with mental illness are not violent,” the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) explains on its website. But wishing away the link can’t make it disappear. In truth, psychosis is a shockingly high risk factor for violence. The best analysis came in a 2009 paper in PLOS Medicine by Dr. Seena Fazel, an Oxford University psychiatrist and epidemiologist. Drawing on earlier studies, the paper found that people with schizophrenia are five times as likely to commit violent crimes as healthy people, and almost 20 times as likely to commit homicide.

NAMI’s statement that most people with mental illness are not violent is of course accurate, given that “most” simply means “more than half”; but it is deeply misleading. Schizophrenia is rare. But people with the disorder commit an appreciable fraction of all murders, in the range of six to nine percent.

“The best way to deal with the stigma is to reduce the violence,” says Dr. Sheilagh Hodgins, a professor at the University of Montreal who has studied mental illness and violence for more than 30 years.

The marijuana-psychosis-violence connection is even stronger than those figures suggest. People with schizophrenia are only moderately more likely to become violent than healthy people when they are taking antipsychotic medicine and avoiding recreational drugs. But when they use drugs, their risk of violence skyrockets. “You don’t just have an increased risk of one thing—these things occur in clusters,” Dr. Fazel told me.

Along with alcohol, the drug that psychotic patients use more than any other is cannabis: a 2010 review of earlier studies in Schizophrenia Bulletin found that 27 percent of people with schizophrenia had been diagnosed with cannabis use disorder in their lives. And unfortunately—despite its reputation for making users relaxed and calm—cannabis appears to provoke many of them to violence.

A Swiss study of 265 psychotic patients published in Frontiers of Forensic Psychiatry last June found that over a three-year period, young men with psychosis who used cannabis had a 50 percent chance of becoming violent. That risk was four times higher than for those with psychosis who didn’t use, even after adjusting for factors such as alcohol use. Other researchers have produced similar findings. A 2013 paper in an Italian psychiatric journal examined almost 1,600 psychiatric patients in southern Italy and found that cannabis use was associated with a ten-fold increase in violence.

The most obvious way that cannabis fuels violence in psychotic people is through its tendency to cause paranoia—something even cannabis advocates acknowledge the drug can cause. The risk is so obvious that users joke about it and dispensaries advertise certain strains as less likely to induce paranoia. And for people with psychotic disorders, paranoia can fuel extreme violence. A 2007 paper in the Medical Journal of Australia on 88 defendants who had committed homicide during psychotic episodes found that most believed they were in danger from the victim, and almost two-thirds reported misusing cannabis—more than alcohol and amphetamines combined.

Yet the link between marijuana and violence doesn’t appear limited to people with preexisting psychosis. Researchers have studied alcohol and violence for generations, proving that alcohol is a risk factor for domestic abuse, assault, and even murder. Far less work has been done on marijuana, in part because advocates have stigmatized anyone who raises the issue. But studies showing that marijuana use is a significant risk factor for violence have quietly piled up. Many of them weren’t even designed to catch the link, but they did. Dozens of such studies exist, covering everything from bullying by high school students to fighting among vacationers in Spain.

In most cases, studies find that the risk is at least as significant as with alcohol. A 2012 paper in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence examined a federal survey of more than 9,000 adolescents and found that marijuana use was associated with a doubling of domestic violence; a 2017 paper in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology examined drivers of violence among 6,000 British and Chinese men and found that drug use—the drug nearly always being cannabis—translated into a five-fold increase in violence.

Today that risk is translating into real-world impacts. Before states legalized recreational cannabis, advocates said that legalization would let police focus on hardened criminals rather than marijuana smokers and thus reduce violent crime. Some advocates go so far as to claim that legalization has reduced violent crime. In a 2017 speech calling for federal legalization, U.S. Senator Cory Booker said that “states [that have legalized marijuana] are seeing decreases in violent crime.” He was wrong.

The first four states to legalize marijuana for recreational use were Colorado and Washington in 2014 and Alaska and Oregon in 2015. Combined, those four states had about 450 murders and 30,300 aggravated assaults in 2013. Last year, they had almost 620 murders and 38,000 aggravated assaults—an increase of 37 percent for murders and 25 percent for aggravated assaults, far greater than the national increase, even after accounting for differences in population growth.

Knowing exactly how much of the increase is related to cannabis is impossible without researching every crime. But police reports, news stories, and arrest warrants suggest a close link in many cases. For example, last September, police in Longmont, Colorado, arrested Daniel Lopez for stabbing his brother Thomas to death as a neighbor watched. Daniel Lopez had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was “self-medicating” with marijuana, according to an arrest affidavit.

In every state, not just those where marijuana is legal, cases like Lopez’s are far more common than either cannabis or mental illness advocates acknowledge. Cannabis is also associated with a disturbing number of child deaths from abuse and neglect—many more than alcohol, and more than cocaine, methamphetamines, and opioids combined—according to reports from Texas, one of the few states to provide detailed information on drug use by perpetrators.

These crimes rarely receive more than local attention. Psychosis-induced violence takes particularly ugly forms and is frequently directed at helpless family members. The elite national media prefers to ignore the crimes as tabloid fodder. Even police departments, which see this violence up close, have been slow to recognize the trend, in part because the epidemic of opioid overdose deaths has overwhelmed them.

So the black tide of psychosis and the red tide of violence are rising steadily, almost unnoticed, on a slow green wave.

For centuries, people worldwide have understood that cannabis causes mental illness and violence—just as they’ve known that opiates cause addiction and overdose. Hard data on the relationship between marijuana and madness dates back 150 years, to British asylum registers in India. Yet 20 years ago, the United States moved to encourage wider use of cannabis and opiates.

In both cases, we decided we could outsmart these drugs—that we could have their benefits without their costs. And in both cases we were wrong. Opiates are riskier, and the overdose deaths they cause a more imminent crisis, so we have focused on those. But soon enough the mental illness and violence that follow cannabis use will also be too widespread to ignore.

Whether to use cannabis, or any drug, is a personal decision. Whether cannabis should be legal is a political issue. But its precise legal status is far less important than making sure that anyone who uses it is aware of its risks. Most cigarette smokers don’t die of lung cancer. But we have made it widely known that cigarettes cause cancer, full stop. Most people who drink and drive don’t have fatal accidents. But we have highlighted the cases of those who do.

We need equally unambiguous and well-funded advertising campaigns on the risks of cannabis. Instead, we are now in the worst of all worlds. Marijuana is legal in some states, illegal in others, dangerously potent, and sold without warnings everywhere.

But before we can do anything, we—especially cannabis advocates and those in the elite media who have for too long credulously accepted their claims—need to come to terms with the truth about the science on marijuana. That adjustment may be painful. But the alternative is far worse, as the patients at Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Institute—and their victims—know.

EDITORS NOTE: This Imprimis column is republished with permission The featured photo is by Smoke & Vibe on Unsplash

The Covington Debacle Shows the Founders Were Right to Distrust Democracy

January 26, 2019/in Culture War, Healthcare, Must Read, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily Signal

In an age in which contempt for fellow citizens is reaching pathological levels, we can be thankful that these institutions exist to protect us.

n the shallow world of modernity, we throw around a word like “democracy” as a stand-in for “things that I like.”

Many in popular culture and elite institutions promote democracy as a cure for all that ails us—an unquestioned and unqualified blessing.

Still others turn on a dime and hope for its demise as soon as it produces outcomes they don’t like.

While democracy often plays a good and necessary role in a self-governing society, we have lost the healthy skepticism of its worst excesses that the Founding Fathers understood when they established the governing institutions of the United States.

These excesses were on full display over the weekend.

The Covington Debacle

The frenzied hate mob unleashed on Catholic, “Make America Great Again” hat-wearing teens—falsely accused of harassing a Native American at the March for Life over the weekend—is a shameful reminder of how fake news can destroy lives and perpetuate evil.

Particularly disturbing is how so many people—celebrities, politicians, and even some respected leaders who should have been warier of grabbing their pitchforks before the facts had been unveiled—fell in with the scramble to condemn the students as hateful racists.

Many of these voices called for violence and other heinous actions against the children from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky. There could be no quarter, no forgiveness, no mercy. The mob needed its pound of flesh.

Celebrities and so-called thought leaders spun out articles and social media posts comparing the Covington Catholic students to segregationists and Ku Klux Klansman, condemning the Catholic Church for a “shameful history of Native American abuses,” and even angrily claiming that smirks and smiles are actually racist.

Even the students’ local diocese quickly rushed into the fray to condemn the students, in effect giving cover to the media outlets seeking to ruin the students’ lives and reputations.

The story was just too good to fact check, too easy to force into a cherished narrative: that white, male Christians are unleashing violence, bigotry, and harassment on minorities all over America.

The problem is, the entire narrative was based on a wild distortion of what occurred.

Media Mob Unleashed

The vicious and often unhinged diatribes we saw launched against the Covington Catholic students laid bare an irrational rage burning beneath the rule of law.

It is no stretch to think that left unchecked, the mob—especially the rage-fueled left—would have unjustly stripped these students of their basic freedoms and abandoned the notion of a presumption of innocence in a rush to judgment.

This is the same pattern we saw transpire in the confirmation battle over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

So, is the problem our reckless and agenda-driven media? Yes, in part.

Media coverage of this incident was dreadful and shameful—a confirmation for many that even America’s most established and influential media institutions have become hopelessly biased and reckless in the age of Trump.

But the problem goes deeper than that. The truth is, fake news was every bit as much a problem in the late 1700s, when our country was formed, as it is today.

The use of the printing press allowed knowledge to travel like wildfire but also gave hucksters and falsehood peddlers a new tool for spreading their wares more effectively.

True, our news today travels much faster, and social media can spread hysteria like a virus. But there’s also an upside.

Public intellectuals and members of the media continually decry the decentralized nature of the internet and its ability to generate “fake news” and misleading stories. They long for the day when America had just a few big outlets acting as responsible news arbiters.

Some even suggest that the answer is to create government agencies to sort through this information and tell us what the truth is, such as what Europe is experimenting with.

This is a terrible way to address the issue.

The Giants Are No Different

It was legacy media outlets in the first place—like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN—that perpetuated the deceptive reporting we witnessed over the weekend and failed to follow basic journalistic practices, such as inquiring about both sides of a heated dispute.

News outlets point to foreign agents and anonymous Twitter accounts that promoted a slanted view of the controversy, but they are just using them as scapegoats. Their own journalistic malpractice is the heart of the problem.

This wouldn’t be the first time these outlets got a story massively wrong and deceived the American people, but now we at least have greater means to debunk falsehoods when they arise.

It was the skeptics who took the time to study the story from all angles, like Robby Soave at Reason, who blew the story up. Soave reviewed footage from the hours of amateur video taken of the incident. While legacy media outlets were still peddling the initial, deceptive narrative, it was collapsing with a simple review of easily obtainable evidence that refuted it.

As my colleague, Kelsey Harkness, noted on “Fox & Friends”: “Just imagine if there were no hourlong, or two-hourlong videos that could exonerate these high school boys. Their lives could be ruined.”

The Dangerous Whims of Democracy

If anything, we need to learn a valuable lesson from this incident.

We should today heed the wisdom of John Adams, who wrote to his friend John Taylor about the excesses of democracy.

This lesson is especially important now as it’s clear that many—especially on the left—have deep and unrelenting contempt for their fellow citizens who disagree with them. He explained that while democracy is no worse than “monarchy or aristocracy,” it is often bloodier than either and “wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.”

Pure democracies devour themselves, Adams wrote, as citizens turn against citizens. “It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy.”

He continued:

Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.

The failures of democracy are the result of the fallen nature of man—a condition that cannot be cured and cannot be changed.

This is why the framers of the Constitution formed our federal republic with a complex web of checks on power.

Democracy had its place—most specifically in the frequent elections of the House of Representatives—but it was removed from decisions dealing with fundamental rights, such as free speech and the right to bear arms enshrined in the First and Second Amendments.

This is the balance the Founders sought to preserve our freedom, and in many cases, save us from ourselves.

The framers designed our system to slow down decision-making—especially at the highest, federal level—to frustrate the ambition of the leaders who represent us, to throw water on the temporary, to excite passions of the people, which may lead the country to folly or tyranny.

These concepts may be lost on progressives and those on the left who believe in the evolution or perfectibility of man (which seems untenable given that they see a potential fascist in everyone who disagrees with them).

But the Founders likely wouldn’t have been surprised by the noxious media frenzy that set out to destroy a few high school students in the name of social justice.

The Founders well understood the threat of fake news. They wisely assessed that despite the threat, the government could not be a trusted arbiter of what is real and fake—so they created the First Amendment.

Then, knowing that this judgment of truth and falsehood could be left only to the people in a free society, they put guardrails on the people themselves so that they could not use this power to tyrannize their fellow citizens on a whim.

This is the genius of America. This is why we have the world’s oldest republic.

In Conclusion

The Founders may not have known us, but they knew history, and they themselves. They knew that unrestrained democracy would lead to a destruction of all freedom, the annihilation of God-given individual rights that governments of all types had trampled throughout human history.

In an age in which contempt for fellow citizens is reaching pathological levels, we can be thankful that these institutions exist to protect us.

Yet given the retreat of constitutional government over the past century, we have less cause for certainty that they will continue to save us from ourselves.

COLUMN BY

Jarrett Stepman

Jarrett Stepman is an editor for The Daily Signal

EDITORS NOTE: This article with images was reprinted from The Daily Signal with permission. Image credit: Pixabay.

The Greater Sins in the Covington Incident

January 26, 2019/in Culture War, Policy, Politics, Religion, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Catholic Thing

Anthony Esolen: Nobody, knowing that he is steeped in moral sewage from head to toe, should rave and rage at the filth on his neighbor’s shoe.

I dislike writing about failure and sin, and dearly wish that the leaders of my Church would give me less occasion to do so.

Everyone by now has heard about what happened to boys from Covington Catholic High School. They were at the Lincoln Memorial, waiting for the bus home to Kentucky. They were in Washington, of course, to protest the murder of unborn children. In other words, unlike almost everybody else who goes to Washington to protest, they were there not to campaign, not to condemn a political party, and not to demand something for themselves, but to protect human lives that are now vulnerable to destruction. Some of them were wearing a Make America Great Again cap.

Then they were harassed, in the vilest terms, by members of what appears to be a lunatic group, the “African Israelites.” They did not respond in kind. They began to chant school chants, to drown out the insults. At that point another protest group came into the picture. They yelled at the boys too, telling them to go back to Europe. This one was led by an American Indian (I too am native; I was born in the United States), beating a drum, within inches of the face of a boy he had apparently targeted. The boy, nonplussed, held his ground and smiled a frozen smile.

Let us enumerate the sins that followed. The Diocese of Covington, along with many another organization and person, leapt to condemn the boy in harsh terms. They did so without knowing what happened. After all, they were not there.

This is called PREJUDICE, or RASH JUDGMENT. You have the tree and the noose ready, and you say so publicly, before you know a thing. What prompts the sin of PREJUDICE? A variety of things, in this case. One was race hatred: many people leapt to judgment because the accused were white. One was our endemic contempt for boys. One was political faction: people who do not believe as I believe about X – fill in the blank – are not simply mistaken, short-sighted, ignorant, or simply possessed of a different judgment about what is possible or advisable for the common good. They are wicked.

That was shortly followed by VINDICTIVENESS. People called for the boy to be expelled, and they were glad to subject him, his family, and his school to national disgrace. The glee of vengeance causes people to lose all sense of proportion, and to forget their sins.

Unless I am much mistaken, this is not a land of saints. To be rude to an old man is bad, even when the old man is behaving in a disgraceful way. Place the worst construction upon the boy’s action. Each of us has done plenty of things that are a hundred times more wicked, vile, and destructive than is that sin in question. If the boy deserved expulsion for that, we should all deserve, for our worst sins, protracted torments followed by slow hanging. The very call for a wildly disproportionate and ruthless punishment was such a sin.

A lot of people began to have second thoughts. Others roamed over the Internet to find something, anything, that would cast the school in a bad light. Some said that the boy did not himself write his sometimes ungrammatical apologia, explaining what happened. They had, of course, no evidence for their accusation.

This was the sin of CALUMNY. By this time, people knew quite well that the boys had not sought out any confrontation, and that they had been already abused by grown men aplenty.

To abuse the weak – children, women, youths – is at least a sin of COWARDICE, and to call them “faggots” and “incest kids” compounded the abuse with the sin of OBSCENITY. To withhold the truth about the context of the incident, truth that would mitigate any guilt, or exonerate entirely, is to commit the sin of DETRACTION.

The Indian with the drum and his group showed up at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception the next evening, attempting to disrupt the Mass. This was a sin of SACRILEGE, against the holy place and the worship of innocent people; in the context of what they had already done, it was the sin of CONTUMACY, and of SOWING DISCORD.

The school had to remain closed the following Monday, and the boy and his family have received plenty of threats of violence and death. I have seen some of these. Incitement to a felony crime is nothing for police to take lightly. These are, at the least, sins of MALICE, not of intemperance; sins committed not in the heat of a situation that has come upon you suddenly, but in the cold; deliberate, calculated, intentional.

At the worst, they are sins of VIOLENCE, and of vicarious participation in the evil that is wished, if someone should be so mad or so wicked as to burn or kill.

I am not calling for the prejudicial, the contumacious, the cowardly, the deceitful, the vindictive, the factious, the malicious, and the violent to be strung up. The point is that, surrounding these boys and taking their words and actions in the worst way they can reasonably be taken, are crowds of people committing the sins I have named, sins that are many orders of magnitude more miserable.

That people can commit them and not be aware of the trap they have set for their own feet is simply astonishing to me. I do not understand it. I’m not a saint. I daresay they are not saints, either. But they think they are.

They must think they are, because nobody, knowing that he is steeped in moral sewage from head to toe, would rave and rage at the filth on his neighbor’s shoe. It would be worse than nonsensical. It would be like begging for the vengeance of God to come down upon you.

COLUMN BY

Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. His latest books are Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. He directs the Center for the Restoration of Catholic Culture at Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Covington bishop apologizes to Covington Catholic students

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EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column with images is republished with permission. © 2019 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

For Islamic Iran, It’s Hunting Season—Again

January 26, 2019/in National Security, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Two weeks ago, Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok blew the whistle on the Iranian regime, accusing it of hiring local hit teams to assassinate prominent Iranian dissidents living in Holland.

Ahmad Mola Nissi, 52, was a leader of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz, a group that seeks to create a breakaway Arab province along Iran’s southern border with Iraq. He was leaving his house in The Hague on Nov. 8, 2017, when a man emerged from a BMW and shot him dead at his front door.

Two years earlier, in a similar shooting, Ali Motamed, 56, aka Mohammad Reza Kolahi, was gunned down near Amsterdam. The Dutch police have jailed two members of a notorious Amsterdam gang in connection with Motamed’s murder.

Blok didn’t just hint at Iranian government involvement, he spelled out in some detail a far-flung criminal conspiracy that led the European Union on Jan. 8 to impose sanctions against the Iranian Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS), freezing its assets in Europe.

In a letter to the Dutch House of Representatives, Blok revealed that the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service had been investigating the Iranian regime’s criminal conspiracy to murder dissidents in Europe since 2015. He also explained that the previously mysterious expulsion in June 2018 of two Iranian diplomats from Holland was related to the wave of assassinations.

The Dutch shared intelligence gathered during their investigation with other European intelligence agencies that helped thwart terror attacks in Denmark and France last year, Blok revealed in his letter.

In July 2017, Belgian police arrested two Iranians in possession of 500 grams of TATP, a homemade explosive, as well as a detonator, and charged them with conspiracy to bomb the opposition Mujahain-e Khalq in Paris. An Iranian diplomat posted to Vienna, was arrested while visiting Germany in connection with the same plot.

In September, Denmark dramatically closed its international borders with Germany and Sweden in an effort to apprehend a suspect in another assassination plot, and in October, a Norwegian citizen of Iranian descent was arrested on suspicion of aiding an unnamed Iranian intelligence service to “act in Denmark,” the country’s intelligence chief told reporters.

For all the drama of these arrests—and the murders themselves—European politicians have remained quiet until now. Blok’s “J’accuse” is the first time the Iranian regime has stood accused of successfully murdering dissidents since the late 1990s, when a former top regime intelligence official, Abolghasem Mesbahi, provided compelling testimony in the Mykonos murder trial in Germany directly implicating Iranian regime leaders.

Until Mesbahi came forward with insider information on the special committee formed of top regime officials that approved the assassinations, Germany and others in Europe did nothing to punish the Iranian regime for the murder of more than 200 dissidents across Europe. After the Mykonos trial, the European Union severed diplomatic relations with the regime and expelled Iranian government ambassadors for eighteen months from Europe.

Will the Europeans act more forcefully today than they did through most of the 1980s and 1990s, as Iranian regime hit teams gunned down dissidents at will?

The lure of profits from Iran is strong. Companies in Germany, Britain, Italy, and France constitute powerful lobbies that have sought protection from the European Union against U.S. sanctions for their continued business in Iran.

And many European-based dissidents I have spoken with complain that the Iranian intelligence services roam the streets at will, conducting acts of harassment and brazen surveillance against them. Some of these dissidents single out the German intelligence services for its close ties to Tehran, and its willingness to share information on their whereabouts and movements with MOIS operatives in Germany.

During his Middle East tour last week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States and Poland would co-host a two-day summit next month in Poland to discuss Iran. The summit, expected to bring together diplomats and leaders from 70 countries, is expected to focus on Iranian regime terror operations, as well as its missile and nuclear weapons programs.

Europe needs to join the United States in taking a tougher stand on Iranian regime terror. For starters, they need to crack down on the Iranian intelligence networks that roam the streets hunting dissidents at will. They know who they are. It’s time for the Europeans to catch them and expel them before they act, not after they commit murder.

Next, Europe needs to acknowledge that the Iranian regime presents a clear and present danger not just to countries in the Middle East, but to Europe and the United States as well. They need to join the United States in sanctions that isolate the regime diplomatically and cripple its financial resources.

Ironically, the summit in Poland will coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Islamic terror regime takeover of Iran. If Pompeo succeeds in rounding up a posse, it could be the last of these anniversaries of darkness.

EDITORS NOTE: This Epoch Times column with images is republished with permission. The featured photo taken in Tehran, Iran is by Keith Zhu on Unsplash.

U.S. Supreme Court (Finally) Takes Another Second Amendment Challenge to a Gun Control Law

January 26, 2019/in Courts & Law, Gun Rights, Policy, Politics, Regulation/by NRA Institute for Legislative Action

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a Second Amendment challenge to a gun control law for the first time in nearly 10 years. Arguments in the case will likely be heard during the court’s next term, which starts in October.

During the opening decade of the 21^st Century, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two landmark rulings that many hoped would revitalize the Second Amendment, which had been all but read out of the Constitution by activist lower judges that favored banning or heavily restricting firearms.

District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) made abundantly clear that the Second Amendment is a fundamental civil right and should be respected as such by the nation’s courts and public officials.

That did not happen.

Instead, the rulings seemed mainly to energize the resistance to the right to keep and bear arms both within and without the judicial system.

Billionaires turned social engineers – most notably Michael Bloomberg – created a new industry around more sophisticated and organized anti-gun efforts.

Elite universities created research departments entirely devoted to engineering empirical support for gun control and rewriting American history as it pertains the Second Amendment and gun ownership.

The same judges with their same lifetime appointments who refused to acknowledge the obvious import of the Second Amendment’s history and text refused to acknowledge the obvious import of the Heller and McDonaldopinions.

And one lower court decision after another upheld the most sweeping and oppressive forms of gun control, including bans on America’s most popular rifles, bans on magazines used for self-defense, bans on dealer sales of handguns to military-aged adults, mandatory handgun licensing fees of $340, discretionary licensing for the carrying of firearms, lengthy waiting periods to acquire guns, and infeasible manufacturing requirements that effectively ban new models of handguns.

Throughout it all, the high court seemed to have turned its back on the Second Amendment, refusing review in case after case. This sometimes provoked impassioned dissents from justices who believed the Second Amendment was being treated as a “disfavored right” and a “constitutional orphan.”

Only once in all this time did the U.S. Supreme Court revisit the Second Amendment in an unsigned opinion that summarily reversed, without argument, a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court opinion that upheld the state’s ban on electrically-powered “stun guns.”

That changed on Tuesday when the high court granted review to the NRA-backed case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York. This case concerns a challenge under the Second Amendment and other constitutional provisions to New York City regulations that effectively ban law-abiding handgun owners from traveling outside the city with their own secured and unloaded handguns.

The bizarre and unique nature of this regulation – apparently the only one of its kind in the nation – and the exceedingly thin “public safety” justification for it potentially make the case low-hanging fruit for another positive Second Amendment ruling.

But whether the Supreme Court will use the occasion to bring lower court defiance of the Second Amendment to heel or simply to rule narrowly on this particular regulation remains to be seen.

The development does, however, underscore the importance to gun owners of President Trump’s appointments to the high court, including Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brent Kavanaugh.

The latter replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was considered the crucial swing vote in the Heller and McDonald cases. Yet Kennedy’s sustained commitment to a robust Second Amendment was always in question, leading to speculation that neither the court’s pro- or anti-gun blocs had the confidence to take another case.

Unlike Kennedy, however, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are committed originalists, the same mode of judicial interpretation that the late Justice Antonin Scalia used in authoring the Heller opinion. Fidelity to that method and to the court’s opinions in Heller and McDonald are the surest guarantees we can have that the Second Amendment will get the respect it is due by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Left-leaning pundits are already issuing hysterical predictions about what this development means for gun control in the United States.

May they be right and then some.

The more sober and mature outlook, however, is a wait-and-see attitude, along with a healthy appreciation of how President Trump’s appointments to the court may finally reenergize a Second Amendment that has been neglected for too long.

Those appointments would not have happened without the steadfast work of NRA members who understand the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court as the final backstop against infringements of our Second Amendment rights. We may now be on the threshold of realizing the fruits of that labor.

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Washington: Attorney General Introduces Additional Gun Ban Legislation

EDITORS NOTE: This NRA-ILA column with images is republished with permission. The featured photo is by Sofia Sforza on Unsplash.

Trump Cave: Short-term Deal — NO WALL MONEY!

January 25, 2019/in Featured, Government Transparency, Immigration, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Dr. Rich Swier

Within minutes after President Trump made his Rose Garden announcement that a “deal” was made to reopen the government the Democratic National Campaign Committee (DNCC.org) sent out the below email:

Watch the video of President Trump’s announcement:

A good friend of mine noted that “compromise is the art of losing slowly.” It now appears that President Trump is more interested in making a deal than keeping America safe by building the wall. Now making a deal is the art of losing slowly.

President Trump now has five options:

Sign legislation passed by both houses of Congress that does not include the $5.7 billion to build the wall.
Veto legislation passed by both houses of Congress that does not include the $5.7 billion to build the wall.
Sign legislation passed by both houses of Congress that does include the $5.7 billion to build the wall.
If Congress does not pass legislation that includes the $5.7 billion to build the wall then declare a national emergency and build the wall.
Do nothing and let the current border situation continue to worsen.

The question is will President Trump, now that he has signed the temporary CR, demand that Pelosi keep her word and open up the House chambers for the State of the Union address?

As the DNCC.org email highlights, “Time for some accountability.” The House and Senate Democrats plan on holding Trump accountable. As they do and the legacy media parrot their propaganda the Republicans will cower in fear. For you see the opposite of peace isn’t war, it is fear. The Democrats and media strike fear in the hearts of Republicans.

Ayn Rand wrote:

“The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other – until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.”

President Trump and the Republican Party are in a state of constant retreat. The Democrats are in a constant state of applying pressure. Today may go down in political history as the end of the Trump presidency.

Trump’s signature slogan was, like George H.W. Bush’s read my lips, “build the wall.” The wall will not be built because the Democrats rightly understand that they have won. They aren’t tired of winning.

The presidential election cycle that is just beginning could turn out to become a rout. The Republicans could lose the Senate and the White House.

Today, January 25, 2019 is the beginning of the retreat and the decline and fall of MAGA. The end.

RELATED VIDEO: Senator Lindsey Graham’s take on the Trump initiative.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Al x on Unsplash.

Religious faith is guaranteed; all religious practice is not

January 25, 2019/in Courts & Law, Culture War, Policy, Politics, Religion/by Matthew Hausman, J.D.

By treating anti-blasphemy initiatives and anti-western rejectionism as protected religious expression, Islamist enablers make a mockery of American values and freedoms.

Secular progressives lack moral clarity when they preach détente with radical Islam while disparaging traditional Judaism and western religion. They mock assertive Jews as chauvinistic or conservative Christians as puritanical, but defend doctrinal supremacists who despise liberal democratic values.

Though the left often cites constitutional principles to justify coddling Islamists, the Constitution does not mandate tolerance of religious extremism. Nor does it guarantee totally unfettered freedom of religion. Freedom of belief is certainly absolute, but the exercise of religion is not when it compromises the rights of others. Moreover, government has a legitimate interest in monitoring extremist ideologies that threaten public health, safety, and welfare.

America’s founding fathers envisioned a republic where individual liberties and communal obligations would be balanced in equipoise. Generations of immigrants were able to embrace the American ideal without abdicating their religious or cultural heritage because the Constitution requires no repudiation of background, imposes no national creed, and respects freedom of belief. It asks in return only that citizens pledge to uphold its principles. Immigrant Jews were able to thrive in this milieu because Jewish law provides “dina d’malchuta dina,” or “the law of the land is the law.” Accordingly, Jews always felt compelled to respect native laws, assuming that none prohibited observance of the commandments.

But supremacist ideologies that undermine the rights of others conflict with the law of the land, and thus are subject to monitoring and – if necessary – restriction.

The tendency to accuse critics of radical Islam of bigotry reflects ignorance or cognitive dissonance, particularly when their criticisms challenge western deference to extremist sensibilities or the intrusion of Sharia on majority culture. By treating anti-blasphemy initiatives and anti-western rejectionism as protected religious expression, Islamist enablers make a mockery of American values and freedoms. Though Islamist intolerance and insularity are often rationalized in the name of multiculturalism, government cannot ignore faith-based conduct that threatens the rights of others. There can be no excuse for honor killing, subjugating women, or imposing foreign parochialism in a society that espouses separation of church and state.

The First Amendment of the Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” By prohibiting the establishment of national religion or endorsement of particular faiths, this language provides the basis for freedom of belief and worship. As integral as this amendment is, however, it does not prohibit government from safeguarding the welfare of its citizens; and the exercise of religion is not absolutely guaranteed when it threatens public safety or the rights of others.

Calling for the subjugation of “infidels” or death penalty for heretics, for example, is incompatible with the Constitution and thus not subject to protection.

No discussion regarding free exercise today can omit reference to the threat of religious militancy. Regarding militant Islam, Rabbi Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein, in his book “Jihad and Genocide,” discussed the jihadist impulse in the following context:

“Since Muslims believe that enduring peace and civic harmony can only be achieved by unconditional obedience to Allah, the project of spreading knowledge of Islam and calling upon non-Muslims to submit to conversion (da’wa) is seen as an invitation to join in the creation of a universal order of peace, justice, and harmony under Allah. When, however, nonbelievers decline that call, they are not regarded as being faithful to their own traditions but rejecting the sovereignty of Allah…”

“Hence, at least theoretically, Muslims are obliged to wage war until the unbelievers either become Muslim or acknowledge Islam’s supremacy…”

As Dr. Rubenstein and others have noted, Islamic militants are not an insignificant minority inhabiting the lunatic fringes of Mideast society. Rather, they represent a powerful element dedicated to global Islamic hegemony. History suggests it is not hyperbole to characterize jihad against the west as a “clash of civilizations” or Islamist supremacism as inconsistent with pluralistic society.

In expanding the boundaries of their dominion since the seventh century, jihadists destroyed the sacred places of non-Islamic peoples they encountered, often using as building materials the rubble from temples, churches, synagogues and cemeteries they destroyed. Characteristic of their disdain for native cultures and beliefs, they built mosques over the ruins of Hindu temples in India, converted churches after overrunning huge swaths of Christian Europe (centuries before the Crusades), and built shrines over ancient Jewish holy sites, including the Cave of Machpelah, Rachel’s Tomb, and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Despite latter-day claims to the contrary, Jerusalem has no scriptural significance in Islam. The Quran, in fact, is devoid of any reference, whereas Hebrew Scripture mentions Jerusalem and Zion more than eight-hundred times. The Dome of the Rock, however, was built on the Temple Mount to symbolize the Jews’ subjugation in their homeland. This impulse to dominate is similar to that which compelled Umayyad Caliph al-Walid to convert the Church of St. John in Damascus to a Mosque in 706 and the Taliban to destroy ancient Buddhist shrines in Afghanistan in 2001.

Indeed, it was this tradition that raised concerns a decade ago regarding a proposal to build a mosque at New York’s “Ground Zero.” Critics then believed that constructing such a facility near the site where thousands were murdered by jihadists on 9/11 would essentially preempt a place held sacred by all Americans, regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion. Despite these reservations, the proposal’s detractors were labeled bigots by progressives, whose accommodation of radical Islam became more pronounced in the years thereafter.

Liberals who excuse Islamist effrontery in the name of religious freedom are incongruously unabashed in their contempt for any perceived encroachment of western religion in secular society. They chastise fundamentalist Christians for opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, but express grave concerns that any discussion of Islamic radicalism will offend Muslim sensibilities. Christians can certainly be criticized when engaging in public debates – such is the nature of American politics. So why should Muslims be regarded differently? If religious expression can be scrutinized when it implicates public interest, there can be no justification for excluding Islamist excess from government purview.

Bureaucratic intervention in religious affairs is often mundane. A church seeking to expand, for example, must apply for zoning approval and go through the same process as any other petitioner. It must file applications that are vetted publicly and which can be denied for a variety of reasons, including concerns for traffic safety, architectural integrity, or continuity of neighborhood character.

Government regulatory authority is not limited to land use enforcement, however, and can be exercised whenever public safety and security are threatened. Christian sects that practice snake-bite rituals, for example, are subject to state laws (upheld by the US Supreme Court) banning the sale and use of poisonous serpents for devotional purposes. Christian Scientists who withhold insulin from diabetic children and Witnesses who deny blood transfusions to minors can be prosecuted for child neglect, abuse, or homicide. Likewise, religious polygamists who take child brides can be arrested for statutory rape, and cults threatening armed violence, like the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, can be restrained using deadly force.

Even something as innocuous as a Lag B’Omer bonfire is subject to municipal fire codes and permit regulations.

Although the First Amendment mandates freedom of worship, it does not grant the right to harass others in the name of religion. This is not to say that government can restrict religious thought. It cannot and should not. However, there must be a balance between the right to free exercise and the need to protect the rights of persons affected by the practices of others.

Accordingly, non-Muslims should not be subjected to Sharia or anti-blasphemy limitations any more than Jews should have to tolerate harassment by evangelicals who proselytize by corrupting Jewish Scripture. The right to free exercise must be counterbalanced by the right to be left alone.

America’s founders conceived of a broadly inclusive society, but they never contemplated empowering religious extremists who would seek to impose their beliefs on others and respect no authority but their own. Militant Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy, as are the efforts of its political vanguard to impose Sharia on non-Muslims. While the European Human Rights Court has affirmed laws prohibiting speech deemed “insulting to the Prophet of Islam” or offensive to Muslim sensibilities, such judicial overreach contravenes the American legal tradition. The US Constitution grants freedom of speech and worship, but it entitles nobody to protection from insult or offense.

Indeed, US citizens are constitutionally protected from extremist enablers who seek to regulate speech or impose totalitarian restrictions through questionable legislation or enforced political correctness. Freedom of belief may be absolute, but freedom of practice is not when it inhibits speech, imposes minority beliefs on the majority, and undermines the law of the land.

EDITORS NOTE: This Israel National News column is republished with permission. The featured photo is by أخٌ في الله ... on Unspla s h.

Chaos in Venezuela by Clare M. Lopez

January 25, 2019/in Featured, National Security, Policy, Politics/by Center For Security Policy

Originally published on Newsmax:

Hundreds of thousands of desperate, hungry, fed-up Venezuelans took to the streets today in cities all over the country after Juan Gerardo Guaidó Márquez, president of the opposition-controlled National Assembly of Venezuela, declared himself Interim President.

Statements of official recognition and support quickly followed from U.S. President Donald Trump and senior administration officials, Canada, and many countries in Central and South America. The governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Russia, and Turkey, notably, remain solidly behind current President Nicolas Maduro.

By day’s end, Maduro cut off diplomatic ties with the U.S. and gave American diplomats 72 hours to leave the country. The Trump administration fired back, saying through a spokesman that “all options are on the table.”

While the diplomatic, moral, and verbal support of the U.S. and other regional countries is surely important, what will matter even more are several factors likely beyond any of their control.

Will the Venezuelan people remain on the streets this time, no matter what?

Will the Venezuelan military remain loyal to Maduro even to the point of firing live rounds at their fellow Venezuelans? (The answer to that may already be coming into view, as there have been reports of live fire from the Venezuelan Guardia Nacional and casualties earlier today.)

Will Maduro’s Cuban, Hizballah, and/or Iranian “security advisors” take an even more active, direct role in putting down what may be the most serious challenge to Maduro’s rule yet?

Stay tuned, as Diosdado Cabello, a member of the Venezuelan National Assembly and reportedly one of the most corrupt politicians in the country, has called Maduro supporters to defend Miraflores Palace, the official presidential residence, in downtown Caracas.

About Clare M. Lopez

Clare M. Lopez is Vice President for Research & Analysis at the Center for Security Policy. She previously was a Senior Fellow with the Center as well as with the London Center for Policy Research, member of Sen. Ted Cruz’ 2016 presidential campaign national security advisory team, Executive Director of the Iran Policy Committee, and a career operations officer with the CIA. Read her complete bio here. Follow Lopez on Twitter @ClareMLopez View all posts by Clare M. Lopez →

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Andrés Gerlotti on Unsplash.

A List of the Necessary Steps to End ‘Christophobia’

January 25, 2019/in Commentary, Culture War, Policy, Politics, Religion/by Dr. Rich Swier

After the recent incident involving Covington Catholic High School students at the Right To Life march in Washington, D.C. it is appropriate to take steps to end “Christophobia.” Of the three major monotheistic religions of the world, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, only Christianity does not have a plan to end the criticism of its beliefs. The Jewish people have anti-Semitism and the followers of Mohammed have Islamophobia to protect their beliefs from non-believers.

What can America and the world do to protect those who believe in Jesus Christ from non-believers?

Perhaps it is useful to use what the other two Abrahamic religions have used successfully as models. Just as the Jewish people have suffered from persecution and endured the horrors of the Holocaust, so to have Christians. Christians were fed to the lions by the Romans, slaughtered by the millions in socialist/Communist countries and are today being persecuted around the world in record numbers for their faith.

By the way, Jesus (عيسى or Issa in Arabic) is mentioned no less than 35 times in the Qur’an. Jesus is listed 27 times by his name, and 8 times as “the Messiah” or “المسيح” in Arabic. Mohammed is mentioned only 4 times in the Qur’an. (Read: All Qur’anic Passages about Jesus.)

Here are recommended steps to end the fear of Christians globally. (If you have other steps please feel free to list them in the comment section below.)

Demand that all politicians refer to Christianity and Christians as followers of “the religion of peace.”
Call anyone who blasphemes God or His Son Jesus as bigoted, hateful and a Christophobe (Christian anti-blasphemy law).
Have the United Nations pass a resolution condemning Christophobia. Any nation state that speaks ill of Christianity must be condemned in the strongest terms and labeled Christophobic.
Have the federal government hire Christians to go into prisons, neighborhoods, communities and recruit new members to the Christian faith, the religion of peace.
Have the federal government subsidize the building of newer and larger churches throughout America and the world that praise the word of God and His Son, Jesus.
Demand that local, state and the federal governments pass laws making it illegal for anyone to criticizes the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Known as “blasphemy laws.”
Designate any criticism or attack against any follower of Jesus, either verbal or physical, as a hate crime.
Force all news sources to treat the followers of Jesus as a special class of people who cannot be criticized, vilified or covered in a negative way.
Demand that Hollywood hire Christian actors and actresses in proportion to the followers of Jesus in the population of the United States. The same for professional sports teams.
Require all school children to read the Bible and become followers of Jesus Christ.
Elect more Christians to positions at the local, state and federal levels in proportion to the followers of Jesus in the population of the United States.
Appoint Christians as judges in proportion to the followers of Jesus in the population of the United States.
Force all businesses to serve the followers of Jesus equally.
Force all non-Christian business to serve Christians equally under penalty of law.
Pass resolutions at the local, state and federal levels making Christians a protected class of citizens.

Perhaps after reading this list you you may be thinking this is a joke. It is not.

These same protections, listed above, are provided in law and culturally to the other two Abrahamic religions at the local, state and federal levels in the U.S. and internationally.

QUESTION: Why not provide the same protections to Christians?

RELATED ARTICLES:

‘Murder on a Genocidal Scale’: Why the US Church Needs to Wake Up to Scourage of Global Christian Persecution

Here Are 3 Ways the Legacy Media Failed in the Covington Incident

The Public School Monopoly Forces Kids to Learn Secular Humanism. We Need More Options.

Silencing Catholic Speech

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Ismael Paramo on Unsplash.

House Republicans Vote Twice to Pay Government Employees During Shutdown

January 25, 2019/in Budget and Finance, Commentary, Policy, Politics, Taxes, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily Signal

House Republicans have now twice voted to pay government employees during the partial shutdown, but neither bill has passed the Democrat-controlled chamber.

“House Republicans have repeatedly introduced measures that would pay federal employees during the stalemate,” Rep. Mike Johnson, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said in a statement provided to The Daily Signal. “Unfortunately, Democrats refuse to budge.”

“It is disingenuous to express outrage over the approximately 800,000 workers missing paychecks, but then continue to vote in favor of withholding their pay. That is precisely what the majority of Democrats are doing,” Johnson added.

In a statement provided to The Daily Signal, Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., said Democrats’ failure to vote with Republicans to pay federal employees is telling.

“Before choosing to go home early for the weekend, 215 Democrats voted to deprive hard-working federal workers of their pay,” Hice said, adding:

Once again, they blocked a good faith effort to ensure all federal employees receive pay during this stalemate as we allow negotiations to continue on border security. This is just the latest example that Nancy Pelosi and Democrats are only interested in hurting President Trump instead of actually solving problems.

Texas freshman lawmaker Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, says “actions speak louder than words,” noting that most Democrats failed to join House Republicans and vote to pay federal employees during the partial government shutdown.

“House GOP voted again to pay federal employees,” Crenshaw tweeted Wednesday. “This time just ten Democrats joined us,” he said, adding that the prior time Republicans voted to pay federal employees, only six Democrats had joined them.

The partial government shutdown has now been ongoing for 34 days due to the fight over $5.7 billion in funding for a barrier at the border.

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, R-N.C., suggested in a tweet that House Democrats had no “sense of urgency” to end the shutdown.

“Democrats decry federal workers not getting paid in one breath and then cancel votes to leave town early in another,” Meadows tweeted Thursday. “Ridiculous—the shutdown is 33 days old. Where is the sense of urgency? There is zero reason anyone in Congress should go home until this is resolved. Period.”

The Senate will be voting on a package to end the shutdown on Thursday, but it is not expected to pass, Politico reported.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called on the Senate to pass the package, but did not acknowledge the votes the House has taken to fund federal employees despite the shutdown.

“As the #TrumpShutdown hits Day 34, the consequences of this senseless shutdown continue to build,” Pelosi tweeted. “President Trump and Senate Republicans must allow us to do the responsible thing and re-open government.”

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., also introduced legislation Jan. 9 to pay federal employees during the government shutdown who are “tasked with securing our border and deterring illegal immigration,” and Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., told The Daily Signal in an email that Democrats should stop their obstruction.

“Nancy Pelosi and Democrats continue to vote against giving our federal workers a paycheck,” Gosar said. “It’s time for Democrats to stop this nonsense and come to the table and end this shutdown. I remain committed to securing our border and getting Americans back to work.”

Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., also highlighted on Twitter Thursday that “214 Democrats voted against paying our federal employees at [the Department of Homeland Security].”

COLUMN BY

Rachel del Guidice

Rachel del Guidice is a reporter for The Daily Signal. She is a graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, Forge Leadership Network, and The Heritage Foundation’s Young Leaders Program. Send an email to Rachel. Twitter: @LRacheldG.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column with images is republished with permission. The featured image is from Congressman Dan Crenshaw’s Facebook page.

INTO THE FRAY: The imperative for incentivized Arab migration & the emerging inevitability of the Humanitarian Paradigm

January 25, 2019/in Culture War, National Security, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Dr. Martin Sherman

Once inconceivable, the dismantling of UNRWA; the naturalization of stateless Palestinian residents in Arab countries; and the emigration of Palestinians from Judea-Samaria & Gaza are slowly emerging as realistic outcomes

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth – Sherlock Holmes, in “The Sign of the Four”.

Over a quarter-century ago (in 1992) , I warned of the consequences—for both Jew and Arab—if Israel were to evacuate Gaza.

I cautioned: “…the inevitable implications of Israeli withdrawal can be ignored only at great peril to Israelis and Arabs alike”, observing:“…no measure whether the total [Israeli] annexation or total [Israeli] withdrawal can be reconciled with either Israel’s security needs or the welfare of the Arab population there.” Accordingly, I concluded that the only viable and durable policy was the resettlement and rehabilitation of the non-belligerent Gazans elsewhere—and I underscored: “this was not a call for a forcibly imposed racist “transfer” by Israel, but rather…a humane and historically imperative enterprise”.

Confusing economic enhancement with “ethnic cleansing”

Today, after a more than a decade-and-a-half of bloody confrontations, including three large scale military engagements—imposed on Israel to protect its civilian population from predicted assaults—and a fourth appearing increasingly inevitable; with the Gazans awash in untreated sewage, with their sources of drinking water polluted, and with perennial power outages, my predictions appear to have turned out to be lamentably precise.

Perversely, earlier this month I was excoriated for…being proven right—and my fact-based professional assessment as a political scientist that, because of the overtly unremitting enmity of the Gazans towards the Jewish state: “Eventually there will either be Arabs in Gaza or Jews in the Negev. In the long run, there will not be both”, was denounced as a call for ethnic cleansing.

Of course, my detractors conveniently ignore that, time and time again, I have called for providing generous relocation grants to help the hapless non-belligerent Gazans find more prosperous and secure lives for themselves elsewhere, in third party countries, outside the “circle of violence”; and to extricate themselves from the stranglehold of the cruel, corrupt cliques who have led them astray from debacle to disaster for decades.

Confusing an unequivocal call for economic enhancement with one for “ethnic cleansing”, they apparently believe—in their “infinite benevolence and wisdom”—that compelling the Gazans to languish in their current conditions is somehow more humane.

But, more on these wildly unfounded recriminations against me perhaps in a future column.

A tripartite plan

Several years after my 1992 article, I extended the idea of incentivized emigration to the Arab population in Judea-Samaria (a.k.a. the “West Bank”) and in 2004 I formulated a tripartite plan (The Humanitarian Paradigm) for the comprehensive resolution—or rather the dissolution of the “Palestinian problem”, which include the following components:

The first was the dismantling of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency), an anomalous UN entity, charged with dealing exclusively with the Palestinian-Arab diaspora (a.k.a. Palestinian “refugees”), displaced by the 1948 and 1967 wars with Israel. As I pointed out back then, because of its anomalous definition of who is considered a “refugee” (which extends to the descendants of those originally displaced), and its anomalous mandate (which precludes resettling them anywhere but in the country from which they were displaced), UNRWA is an organization which (a) perpetuates (rather than resolves) the predicament of the stateless Palestinian “refugees”; (b) perpetuates (rather than dissipates) the Palestinian-Arab narrative of “return” to pre-1948 Israel. Accordingly, the continued existence of UNRWA is an insurmountable obstacle to any resolution of the “Palestinian problem”—and hence its dismantling—or at least, radical restructuring—is an imperative precondition for progress toward any such resolution.

The second component was the launch of an international campaign to induce the Arab countries to desist from what is essentially a policy of ethnic discrimination against the Palestinian diaspora, resident in them for decades, and to grant its members citizenship—rather than keeping them in a perpetual state of stateless “refugees”, as a political weapon with which to bludgeon Israel. To date, any such move is prohibited by the mandate of the Arab League.

A tripartite plan (cont.)

The reasoning behind this prohibition was made clear in a 2004 LA Times interview with Hisham Youssef, then-spokesman for the 22-nation Arab League, who admitted that Palestinians live “in very bad conditions,” but maintained that the official policy on denying Palestinians citizenship in the counties of decades-long residence is meant “to preserve their Palestinian identity.” According to Youssef: “If every Palestinian who sought refuge in a certain country was integrated and accommodated into that country, there won’t be any reason for them to return to Palestine.”

The significance of this is clear.

The nations comprising the Arab League are prepared to subordinate the improvement of the dire humanitarian conditions of the Palestinians, resident throughout the Arab world, to the political goal of preserving the “Right of Return” — i.e. using them as a pawn to effect the elimination of Israel as the nation-state of the Jews.

It is to the annulment of this pernicious policy that international pressure must be directed.

The third—and arguably the most controversial—element was to offer the non-belligerent Arab residents in Judea-Samaria generous relocation grants to provide them and their families an opportunity to seek a better and safer future in third-party host-nations, than that which almost inevitably awaits them—if they stay where they are.

Atomization & de-politicization

To overcome potential resistance to accepting the relocation/rehabilitation grants, I stipulated two elements regarding the manner in which the funding activity is to be carried out: (a) the atomization of implementation of the grant payments; (b) the de-politicization of the context in which they are made.

(a) Atomization: This implies that the envisaged compensation will be offered directly to individual family heads/breadwinners—not through any Arab collective (whether state or sub-state organization), who may have a vested interest in impeding its payment. Accordingly, no agreement with any Arab collective is required for the implementation of payment to the recipients—merely the accumulated consent of fate-stricken individuals, striving to improve their lot.

(b) De-politicization: The incentivized emigration initiative is not cast as a political endeavor but rather a humanitarian one. This reflects a sober recognition that, after decades of effort, involving the expenditure of huge political capital and economic resources, there is no political formula for the resolution of the conflict. Accordingly, efforts should be channeled into dissipating the humanitarian predicament of the Palestinian-Arabs, which the insoluble political impasse has precipitated.

These two elements–direct payments to individuals and the downplaying of the political nature of the relocation/rehabilitation grants and the emphasis on the humanitarian component are designed to circumvent—or at least attenuate—any claims that acceptance of the funds would in some way entail an affront to—real or imagined—national sentiments.

Once inconceivable, now slowly materializing

For many years, advocating these three elements—the dismantling (or at least the radical restructuring) of UNRWA; the naturalization of the Palestinian diaspora resident in Arab countries as citizens; and the emigration of Palestinian-Arabs from Judea-Samaria and Gaza—seemed hopelessly unrealistic.

However today, all three are slowly but inexorably materializing before our eyes in a manner that would have appeared inconceivable only a few years ago.

Of course, a major catalyst for this nascent metamorphosis has been the Trump administration.

The US administration has—despite hitherto unexplained and inexplicable Israeli reluctance—exposed the fraudulent fiasco of UNRWA. As its erstwhile biggest benefactor, the US has retracted all funding from the organization. But more importantly, it has focused a glaring spotlight on the myth of the “Palestinian refugees” and the spectacularly inflated number of such alleged “refugees”—which even include those who have long acquired citizenship of some other country!

This salutary US initiative has the potential to rescind the recognition of the bulk of the Palestinian diaspora as “refugees”. Thus, even if they continue to receive international aid to help ameliorate their humanitarian situation, this will not be as potential returnees to their alleged homeland in Israel.

Once the Palestinian diaspora is stripped of its fraudulent refugee status, the door is then open to settling them in third party countries other than their claimed homeland, and to their naturalization as citizens of these counties.

Naturalization of Palestinian diaspora in countries of residence

In this regard, the Trump administration has reportedly undertaken an important initiative–see here; here; and here. According to these reports, President Trump has informed several Arab countries that, at the start of 2019, he will disclose a citizenship plan for Palestinian refugees living in those countries.

Significantly, Palestinian sources told the news outlet: “Trump informed several Arab countries that the plan will include Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.” According to these sources: “the big surprise will be that these countries have already agreed to naturalize Palestinian refugees.” Moreover, it was reported that senior US officials are expected to seriously raise an American initiative with several Arab countries—including stipulation of the tools to implement it, the number of refugees, the required expenses, and the logistics demanded from hosting countries for supervising the process of “naturalization of refugees”.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of such an initiative, which coincides precisely with the second element in the foregoing tripartite plan. For, it has the potential to remove the ominous overhang of a five million strong (and counting) Palestinian diaspora that threatens to inundate the Jewish state and nullify its ability to function as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

As such, the Israeli government and all pro-Zionist entities should strive to ensure its implementation.

Emigration: The preferred option of the Palestinians?

As for the third element of the tripartite plan, emigration of the Palestinian population to third-party countries, there is rapidly accumulating evidence that emigration is emerging as an increasingly sought-after option. Indeed, earlier this month, Israeli mainstream media highlighted the desire to leave Gaza in order to seek a better life elsewhere. For example, the popular website, YNetnews, ran a piece entitled, Gaza suffers from brain drain as young professionals look for better life, with the Hebrew version appearing a few days previously, headlined The flight from Gaza: What Hamas is trying to conceal from the media. Likewise, the KAN Channel ran a program reporting very similar realities (January 13).

These items come on the heels of a spate of previous articles that describe the widespread clamor among Gazans to find alternative places of abode—see for example For Young Palestinians, There’s Only One Way Out of Gaza (Haaretz) ; Thousands Abandon Blockaded Strip as Egypt Opens Crossing (Alaraby); As Egypt Opens Gaza Border, A Harsh Reality is Laid Bare (Haaretz); and How Turkey Has Become the Palestinian Promised Land (Haaretz).

The Ynetnews piece describes the fervor to leave: “Leaving Gaza is expensive, particularly for the residents of the impoverished coastal enclave…The demand is high, and the waiting list to leave is long…Those wishing to cut short their wait must pay for a place on a special list, which is run by a private firm in Gaza…The price for a place on this special list is $1,500—a fortune for the average resident of Gaza…”

It would appear then, that the only thing preventing a mass exodus from Gaza is…money. Which is precisely what the tripartite plan proposes providing.

Let their people go: A slogan for April’s elections?

There is, of course, little reason to believe that, if Israel were to leave Judea-Samaria, what happened in Gaza would not happen there. After all, the preponderance of professional opinion appears to hold that, if the IDF were to evacuate Judea-Samaria, it would likely fall to elements very similar to those that seized power in Gaza—and the area would quickly be transformed into a mega-Gaza-like entity, on the fringes of Greater Tel Aviv—with all the attendant perils that would entail.

Sadly however, despite its clear strategic and ethical advantages over other policy proposals, few in the Israeli political system have dared to adopt incentivized emigration as part of their platform. The notable exception is Moshe Feiglin and his Zehut party –and, to certain extent, Bezalel Smotrich, the newly elected head of the National Union faction in the Jewish Home Party, previously headed by Education Minister Naftali Bennett.

It is, however, time for the idea of incentivized emigration to be embraced by the mainstream parties as the only viable policy paradigm that can ensure the continued survival of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. It is time for the mainstream to adopt an election slogan that sounds a clarion call to “Let their people go”.

EDITORS NOTE: This column with images is republished with permission. The featured photo is by Cole Keister on Unsplash.