MIDEAST INTEL REPORT: Turkey, Syria, Russia and the Perils of Appeasing Hitler

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TURKEY/SYRIA

On 15 February 2020 both the Qatar-based and owned, and pro-Muslim Brotherhood, and pro-Turkey www.aljazeera.net and the Saudi-owned www.alarabiya.net and both of their TV outlets reported that Russia is accusing Turkey of arming “rebel” groups in Syria with American manufactured weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles.

Both news outlets also reported that in addition to Turkey providing these “rebels” with weapons, they are also providing them with regular Turkish army uniforms.

What is interesting here, is the different terminology that each of these news organizations use to describe these “rebel,” or anti-regime groups.  We will look first at Al-Jazeera, which supports Turkey’s policy of using former ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists  as “shock” troops to pave the way for Turkey’s eventual re-establishment of the Jihadist Ottoman Empire Caliphate, a goal which Qatar and its Muslim Brotherhood client also support.

Al-Jazeera uses the terms al-mu’aaredah (opposition) and al-musaleheen (the armed ones) to describe the groups receiving the Turkish uniforms and American weapons.  By ignoring the al-Qaeda and ISIS connections of these groups Turkey is arming, al-Jazeera is legitimizing them in the eyes of western media outlets many of whom simply copy

al-Jazeera reports for their Middle East news.  This in turn, makes it easy for western political leaders to ignor Turkey’s ISIS and al-Qaeda connections.

Whereas al-Arabiyya TV, and website, provide the full, correct identification of the recipients, namely hay’at tahreer ash-sham (The Liberation of Syria corps), which is nothing but a spin-off of jebhet an-nusrah (The Victory Front), which in turn is nothing but a spin off from al-Qaeda.

Let me repeat what this actually means.  Our NATO “ally” Turkey is providing American arms to al-Qaeda.

The Saudi-owned al-Arabiyya outlet went on to report that Turkey has also deployed more than 70 tanks, 200 other types of armored vehicles, and 80 artillery pieces.  The report went on to say that a “large part” of this equipment was handed over to the fighters of the an-Nusrah front terrorist group.

The al-Jazeera account, while ignoring the al-Qaeda connection, quoted Turkish President Erdogan as saying that if Syria does not halt its “aggression” and pull back to the lines Erdogan says were agreed upon at Astana and Sochi by the end of this month, that Turkey, supported by its allies, would force them to withdraw, and if Turkey’s allies would not help, then Turkey would accomplish that by itself.

Turkey maintains (and has said this numerous times) that it will never leave Idlib beause Idlib is vital to Turkey’s national security.

RUSSIAN INFORMATION

Both of these Arabic news entities cited as their source for some of this information a Russian Political Military source via the website “interfax.”  Many in West would therefore like to discount it as Russian misinformation.  However, I tend to believe this is accurate information for the simple reason that it tracks with everything else Turkey has done in the so-called “War on Terror.”  Why not?  The United States itself directly armed and worked with al-Qaeda offshoots in Syria during the Obama Administration years, and Turkey is the godfather of ISIS, helping it through its gestation period and selling its stolen oil on the black market to help finance it once it had taken over large swaths of Iraq and Syria.

ANALYSIS:

As for Idlib being vital to Turkey’s national security . . . since when?  And, by whom?  For the last several years of the Syrian civil war Idlib has been a province ruled almost entirely by al-Qaeda–under Turkey’s auspices.  The only difference now is that Turkey is moving in itself, and it is moving in to stay.

Notice also that Erdogan is threatening to bring NATO in on its plan to conquer Syria, and in so doing possibly start a major war between NATO and Russia.  Erdogan’s threats against the Syrian armed forces is a veiled threat against Russia whose airpower is supporting the Syrian push into Idlib.  That’s all we need is for this pro-Muslim Brotherhood NATO “ally” to get us into a war with Russia which could spill over into Central Europe should Russia begin to lose ground in Syria.

And, since when does an invading country have the right to call the armed forces of the country being invaded the “aggressor” when it tries to retake its own territory from armed terrorist groups supported by the invading country?

Turkey complains about the flood of refugees entering its country.  Well, this is a war that Turkey is largely responsible for, so I for one have no sympathy.  As for the current situation in Idlib, had Turkey not armed and coddled Al-Qaeda, and supported their occupation of Idlib, the Syrian armed forces would not now be having to use military force to reacquire that province and there would be no flood of refugees into Turkey.

THE PERILS OF APPEASING HITLER

Neville Chamberlain is accused of being responsible for WWII because he gave Hitler the green light to invade a portion of a neighboring country.  But Chamberlain really had no other choice.  The Brits had no troops in Czechoslovakia, therefore no way to deter Hitler anyway.  Nor was there any unified western stand against Hitler’s ambitions until it was too late.

Do we not see the same thing happening here?

Erdogan, the 21st century Hitler, is following a very predictable game plan.  First he sends armed terrorist groups into a country to create chaos.  Then he complains about “national security threats to Turkey” and wins a Western okay to either engage in “joint patrols” which then become all Turkish patrols because the joint patrols “didn’t work,” or he wins Western acquiescence to go ahead and send in Turkish troops to establish order as he is now doing in Idlib.

We can expect Turkey to repeat this process over and over again until it has reconstituted the jihadi Ottoman Empire Caliphate in its entirety, and then some.

Poor old Neville Chamberlain.  But at least he, and the English, never armed their Hitlerian enemy.  The United States, on the other hand, has been, is, and will in the near future arm its new Hitlerian enemy to the teeth with the latest high tech weaponry (probably to include F-35s).  And, not only that, the U.S. looks the other way when this 21st century Hitler arms the terror group al-Qaeda with American manufactured weapons no less.

Hey folks, wasn’t al-Qaeda the whole reason we got into these “never-ending” Middle Eastern wars?  Anybody out there remember 9/11?

So, where did these policies come from?  Why is the Trump administration in 2020, over three years into its 1st term, following this same path of its predecessor, at least on this one issue?

I believe the origins of this policy are to be found in academia.  Throughout the 20th century academia has exerted tremendous efforts to whitewash Islam in general, and towards the last few decades of the 20th century, the Muslim Brotherhood in particular.  This in turn led to a strain of “thought” in the State Department that the solution to violence and terrorism in the Middle East would be Muslim Brotherhood rule.

The Obama administration went one step further making one of the cornerstones of its Middle East Foreign Policy the re-establishment of the Ottoman Empire Caliphate under Turkish auspices united with the Muslim Brotherhood heading up the Sunni Arab countries.  That viewpoint still holds sway in at least the upper levels of the State Department, if not throughout its entire cadre, and current Secretary of State Pompeo has apparently adopted that idea as a major policy plank and sold it to President Donald Trump.

Though President Trump has dropped hints that he’d like to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization (as have seven other countries), he can’t do so unless he also comes to terms with the Turkey situation, since its ruling party the AKP is a clone of the Brotherhood, and Turkey is one of the leading supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood international, along with its ally and fellow terrorism supporter Qatar.

Therefore, I see the U.S. administrations continuing to go along with Erdogan’s schemes like the proverbial toad in the pot of slowly boiling water.

Heartbreaking.

TURKEY AND LIBYA

Turkish advances into northern Syria have had ramifications on the Libyan war as well.  Egyptian and Saudi media outlets have been reporting continuously for the last several months on the flood of “fighters” from Syria that Turkey is transporting to Libya to support the Sirraaj government in Tripoli.  Were Turkey to win the current tug of war with Russia and Syria over the Idlib province in Syria, that process of sending al-Qaeda and ISIS leftovers and sympathizers into Libya will continue.

Meanwhile, the Europeans are pushing for a permanent “cease fire” in Libya, and trying to pressure the Libyan National Army led by General Khalifa Haftar to accept it.  Such a cease fire will only guarantee not only the survival of the Sirraaj government in Tripoli, which hosts a number of the world’s leading terrorists, but would also preserve Turkey’s foothold in Libya.  According to numerous Saudi, Egyptian, and Russian reports,  and as reported previously on this site, Turkey has been using that foothold to smuggle weapons into Africa’s Sahel region in which a large, de facto “super Islamic State” is forming.  This is a region that will soon be exporting terrorism into Europe, and possibly beyond.

Thus, any sort of cease fire or international agreement to make the current status quo permanent only guarantees  the fulfillment of the worst case scenario cited by numerous news entities in the West as well as the Middle East.

The Europeans by voting in favor of a permanent cease fire in Libya are voting for their own suicide.

This is turn illustrates an issue that virtually all decision-makers and policy wonks in the west share, and this is an inability to identify the enemy.  In World War Two it was easy.  The enemies were the nation states of Germany, Japan, and for a while, Italy.  When you are fighting nation states, it is easy to identify the enemy and therefore easy to demonize the enemy and rally public opinion around the war effort.

But when the enemy happens to be a religion, the West is entirely bamboozled.  The best the West could come up with was a “War against Terrorism.”  This war was fought by killing off the leadership of known terrorist organizations and in some cases, undermining their organizational structures, and then thinking that the “War against Terror” was won.  But it did absolutely nothing in terms of undermining and destroying the ideology that makes the terrorist groups possible, and that will continue to feed those groups and/or their successors for many decades, or centuries, to come if we continue to fail to take this threat seriously.

The United States is very good at winning conventional wars against conventional enemies (i.e. the nation states), but is at a total loss as to how to deal with this 1400 year war for survival that it refuses to acknowledge.  It is much easier for the Pentagon bosses, media, and politicians to “pivot” away from a problem it does not understand so as to direct its energies towards problems that it does understand, namely other nation states.

Unfortunately, one of the chief axioms of war is that you cannot defeat an enemy that you cannot identify.

It was to address this gap in Western thinking that I wrote the book mentioned below.

TUNISIAN ELECTIONS

The result of the Tunisian parliamentary elections several months ago had the

an-nahdhah (renaissance) party wining a narrow plurality of the votes.  The an-nahdhah party is a clone of the Muslim Brotherhood, though they have tried to pretend otherwise, and have been suspected by segments of the Tunisian populace of a pair of political murders when they briefly held the majority in the parliament in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

As a result of the Tunisian public’s suspicions about an-nahdhah none of the other Tunisian political parties were willing to join with it in a coalition government.  Thus, the Tunisian President Qais Sa’eed asked the number two party to form the coalition, which they did.  But now, Arabic media sources are reporting that the an-nahdhah party refused to recognize the coalition as legitimate because they were left out of it.

Consequently, the Tunisian political situation is still in turmoil.  This is especially pertinent given the on-going civil war next door in Libya, and that the head of the Muslim Brotherhood clone an-nahdhah party just paid a visit to Turkish president Erdogan, whose ruling AKP party is also a clone of the Muslim Brotherhood, and who also happens to be deeply involved in the Libyan Civil war.

© All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Iran’s Sham Parliamentary Elections Aim to Strengthen Hard-Liners’ Hand

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: Deny sex is binary, embrace conversion therapy and then theirs Pete Buttigieg

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EDITORS NOTE: This is the eleventh in a series titled Decadent Democrats. You may read the previous installments here:

DECADENT DEMOCRATS — From Pedophilia to Sex with Animals

DECADENT DEMOCRATS — From Electing a Dream ‘Queer Latina’ Candidate to No Incarceration For Drug Use of Any Kind

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: The Enemies of America are Our Best Friends Forever

DECADENT DEMOCRATS — From Ricky Gervais’ Golden Globe Diatribe to Abortion to Climate Change [+Videos]

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: From Creating Weak Men and Disorderly Women to Making Sex a Biological Reality Illegal

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: From the Party of Abortion and Allah Akbar to the 2020 Right to Life March and death of terrorist Soleimani

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: The Party of Marx, Mao and Mohammed

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: Their calls for violence created ANTIFA

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: Biden, Warren and Sanders reject President Trump’s Middle East peace plan

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: Liberals pay $2,500 to be told they’re racists, kiss the boots of blacks [Video]

The Democratic Party is all in when it comes to homosexuals. The party of Catholic President John F. Kennedy can’t help itself. Democrats even have, for the first time in history, Pete Buttigieg, a homosexual, running for president in their primary.

This is a turn around in policy and politics. We must remember what President Barack Obama, Oct. 27, 2010, in in an interview with liberal bloggers discussed his views on gay marriage:

“I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage. But I also think you’re right that attitudes evolve, including mine.”

Then in May, 2012 Politico reported that President Obama evolved in his opinion of same-sex marriage stating:

“I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”

Rhuaridh Marr in a July 27, 2016 article The Democratic Party Platform is the most pro-LGBT in history reported:

This week, in Philadelphia, Democrats approved the most pro-LGBT party platform in their history. Almost half a century in the making, it represents a culmination of the struggle of LGBT activists to be recognized at the highest levels of politics. If 2012 was a watershed moment, when marriage equality was enshrined in that year’s party platform, 2016’s platform is an affirmation, a celebration of the rights of every LGBT American. The sheer breadth of the platform stands in contrast to the hate and opposition of its Republican counterpart.

Why do Democrats fully embrace the LGBTQ agenda?

The LGBTQ agenda includes:

  • Conversion therapy.
  • Teaching children about homosexuality in elementary schools.
  • Supporting male transgenders into women and girl sports.
  • Call anyone who disagrees with the LGBTQ agenda homophobic.
  • Embracing pedophiles such as Jeffery Epstein.
  • Passing policy The Equality Act on on May 17, 2019. The Equality Act is a bill passed by the United States House of Representatives that would amend the Civil Rights Act to “prohibit discrimination on the basis of the sex, sexual orientation, gender identity.”

ANSWER: Because the Democratic Party loves what they consider homosexuals to be consummate victims.

For Democrats homosexuals are victims, just as are blacks, Muslims, illegal aliens, pedophiles, transsexuals, Hispanics, etc. Victimhood is a prerequisite to becoming a member of the Democrat Party.

What is most interesting is that Democrats embrace a lifestyle that is both harmful and hurts individuals according to recent studies.

Democrats ignore science, genetics, DNA and multiple scientific studies that show homosexuality is neither natural nor normal. In fact science tells us that homosexuality is harmful and hurtful.

But this doesn’t matter because its all about getting votes.

Sex is Binary

In a February 14, 2020 Breitbart article titled No Sex ‘Spectrum’ Beyond Male and Female Thomas D. Williams, PH. D wrote:

The Wall Street Journal has issued a throwdown to the gender lobby, insisting in an op-ed Thursday that sex is binary and there is no “spectrum.”

“In humans, reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female at birth more than 99.98% of the time,” note biologists Colin M. Wright and Emma N. Hilton. “The evolutionary function of these two anatomies is to aid in reproduction via the fusion of sperm and ova.”

“No third type of sex cell exists in humans, and therefore there is no sex ‘spectrum’ or additional sexes beyond male and female. Sex is binary,” they assert.

In a February 16, 2020 article in the journal Public Discourse titled Transition as Treatment: The Best Studies Show the Worst Outcomes notes:

A pattern begins to emerge as we survey some of the best and longest outcome studies on gender transition: the longer the studies and the better the methods, the more negative the results.

The [conversion therapy]treatment for this particular disorder is severe: lifelong experimental medicalization, sterilization, and complete removal of healthy body parts—a treatment Dr. Ray Blanchard, one of the world’s foremost sexologists, calls “palliative.” In spite of its severity, however, medical gender transition is no longer a rarity. It is the recommended treatment for gender dysphoria, a diagnosable disorder of incongruence between one’s felt “gender” and one’s natal sex, the prevalence of which is increasing tremendously throughout the world. More and more children and adolescents are being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and are undergoing medical treatment prior even to completing puberty.

For those who express caution or concern there is a familiar retort: “Trust the experts.” If you don’t, “you’re a bigot.”

This argument, however, makes a mockery of the fact that three of the most influential sex researchers of the last couple decades—Ray Blanchard, Michael Bailey, and the recently vindicated Ken Zucker—all have problems with the affirmation-only transition narrative that is currently being promoted. You could add to this list names like James Cantor, Eric Vilain, Stephen Levine, Debra Soh, and Lisa Littman.

In the February 13, 2020 article Science, Sex, and Suicide   asks, “Why would Scientific American urge a ban on therapies that may free some from an identity associated with greater depression and suicide, and yet never question “treatments” for gender dysphoria that lead to increased confusion, depression, and suicidal tendencies?

Otto explains:

Scientific American started off the new year—the publication’s 175th—with an editorial that unintentionally demonstrates the reality that science is not simply the dispassionate determination of the laws of nature. A great deal more than genetics and biology seems to be involved when the subject is LGBTQ-related, particularly when it concerns young people who are questioning their sexual identity.

The editorial, “Time’s Up for ‘Anti-Gay Therapy,’” calls for a federal resolution banning “conversion therapy.” The editors begin by referring to the story of a man named McKrae Game, a former champion of conversion therapy who recently left his wife and his ministry, “Hope for Wholeness.” Game has now come out as gay, pleading forgiveness for the harm he did by promoting what his organization called “freedom from homosexuality through Jesus Christ.” Game joins a growing number of former leaders of so-called “anti-gay therapy” who have recently disavowed the practice.

Conclusion

Democrats are hell bent on pushing the LGBTQ agenda on all Americans. Saying that sex is binary, believing that marriage is between one man and one woman are considered “hate speech” by Democrats.

Pointing out  that conversion therapy is harmful is deemed non-scientific, when the science is clear. The entire concepts of boy and girl, man and woman, husband and wife are now foreign to the Democratic Party.

Same-sex marriage may be legal but it is not common. What is common is that since the legalization of same-sex marriage the Democrats in concert with LGBTQ activists have made it their mission to fundamentally transform the ideal that sex is binary.

© All rights reserved.

For more articles on the LGBTQ Agenda click here.

Does the Catholic Church Really Have An ‘Islamophobia’ Problem?

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My latest at PJ Media:

Out of India this week comes the harrowing story of T.J. Joseph, a professor at a Catholic college and member of the Syro Malabar Church, an Eastern Catholic Church in communion with Rome. Ten years ago, Joseph was accused of blasphemy, whereupon a Muslim group attacked him and severed his hand. In the ensuing years, the Syro Malabar Church, aghast not at the attack but at Joseph’s alleged “Islamophobia,” fired him from his job and excommunicated him. The day after that story came out, one Jordan Denari Duffner of Georgetown University’s Hamas-linked Bridge Initiative, published a piece in the Religion News Service (RNS) claiming that Catholics have an “Islamophobia” problem. Ask T.J. Joseph what he thinks of that, Ms. Duffner.

Duffner piece focused upon the case of the Rev. Nick VanDenBroeke, about which I wrote here at PJ Media. VanDenBroeke landed in hot water when he called Islam “the greatest threat” to Christianity and the U.S., and was subsequently forced to recant and apologize by his boss, Archbishop Bernard Hebda. “The whole incident,” says Duffner, “is reflective of a deeper problem,” which is unlikely to be something she would say about the excommunication of T.J. Joseph. No, Duffner is more worried about what she characterizes as “the discrepancy between the church’s positive official teaching on Muslims and the Islamophobia that often permeates U.S. Catholic communities and discourse.”

Duffner reminds us that “in its 1965 ‘Declaration on Non-Christian Religions,’ issued during the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church begins by declaring its high esteem and respect for Muslims.” She apparently would have us believe that VanDenBroeke, by identifying a threat from the religion that preaches warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers, is demonstrating a lack of esteem and respect for Muslims. For “the most important aspect of the church’s statement about Muslims,” she says, “is the first line — the teaching that we are to treat Muslims with respect and hold them in high regard. In other words, as Catholics our default attitude toward Muslims is to be a positive one.”

Back in the real world, however, the real problem the Catholic Church has is not the spurious neologism “Islamophobia,” but a fantasy-based Islamophilia that denies obvious reality and is ruthlessly enforced, as the outrages the Church committed against T.J. Joseph demonstrates, and of which Duffner’s article is an example.

Duffner is either spectacularly naive or outrageously deceptive or both; in all her writings, not just this one in RNS, she completely ignores the reality of jihad violence and the violent exhortations in the Qur’an and Sunnah. She continuously writes as if Muslims were victims of widespread discrimination and harassment in the U.S., which they are not and should not be, and that any examination of the motivating ideology behind that jihad violence is tantamount to inciting violence against innocent Muslims.

In her book Finding Jesus among Muslims: How Loving Islam Makes Me a Better Catholic, Duffner even laments the “Islamophobia” of a Christian family in Jordan she stayed with as an exchange student, claiming they picked it up from Christian television channels and not from their lived experience, which she assumes would have given them a positive impression of Islam: “Despite the fact that they lived among Muslims — who are the vast majority of the population in Jordan — my Christian host family bought into these Christian TV channels’ negative portrayals of Islam.”

There is much more. Read the rest here.

RELATED ARTICLE: HBO runs yet another anti-Catholic series, remains silent on Muslims

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Forthcoming Book lists Trump as one of the Greatest Presidents, Twitter Leftists’ heads explode

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This morning I wrote an article for PJ Media that makes a point that I elaborate in my forthcoming book, Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Then over on Twitter I noticed that “#PresidentObama” was trending for Presidents Day, as a huge crowd of Twitter Leftists hailed the socialist internationalist Obama as if he had actually been a good President.

Well, I admit I couldn’t resist, and tweeted this:

Head over to Twitter and look at the comments on that tweet: watch the fun as the Twitter Leftists howl at the prospect of someone daring to question one of their most sacred dogmas. The truth really does hurt some people, badly, like a physical pain.

And preorder the book here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Lawmakers in 9 States Move to Protect Children From LGBT ‘Transition’ Agenda

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Conservative lawmakers have decided to become proactive about the transgender epidemic infiltrating the nation’s youth.

In the past couple of months, Republican lawmakers in at least nine states have introduced legislation to ban medical providers from helping boys and girls undergo a medical transition via surgery and/or hormone replacement therapy before they turn 18.

Some of the bills would make it a felony to prescribe hormones or perform related surgeries for minors.

In South Dakota, state Rep. Fred Deutsch, a Republican, spearheaded the effort. The South Dakota Legislature passed its version of the bill just this month.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

If Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, signs the bill into law, doctors who offer medical transitions in the form of hormone replacements or surgery to children under 16 could receive a one-year jail sentence or a hefty fine.

Colorado, West Virginia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Missouri, Florida, Illinois, and Kentucky all have similar provisions in the works, although the details vary.

In a tweet, Deutsch said: “The world is upside-down that protecting children from sterilization and mutilation is causing a firestorm.”

In a statement emailed to USA Today, he said:

Every child in South Dakota should be protected from dangerous drugs and procedures. The solution for children’s identification with the opposite sex isn’t to poison their bodies with mega-doses of the wrong hormones, to chemically or surgically castrate and sterilize them, or to remove healthy breasts and reproductive organs.

Sex reassignment surgery—a phrase the LGBTQ lobby hijacked and changed to “gender reassignment surgery,” a subtle but important difference—has had enough success and failure for lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle to use to their advantage.

Or so they think. A USA Today article, which is rather thorough, paints GOP lawmakers as interventionists who suddenly want to get involved in people’s “personal” lives. It cites professionals who voice disdain for lawmakers who would keep today’s youth from living as their feelings dictate.

These lawmakers face an uphill battle because of LGBTQ backlash and public relations. Reputable medical groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have come out in favor of providing surgical and hormone replacement transitions as appropriate treatment for children struggling with gender dysphoria, despite little evidence it cures the dysphoria.

In fact, while little evidence exists either for or against medical transitions, because it’s such a new phenomenon, statistics show that some people who transition experience regret.

Fortunately, conservative lawmakers who propose these bills come from a place of education, combined with empathy and caution.

Because this is optional surgery, and not a life-or-death medical procedure (such as neurosurgery following a stroke), Republican lawmakers propose banning the surgery for teenagers, to err on the side of safety.

Although a speckling of success stories are told by medically transitioned teens and adults, more tales of failure, and horror, are out there.

These stories abound, though critics of the proposed bills seem to ignore them entirely.

In a powerful essay published by The New York Times in 2018, a writer who was born a man and was about to medically transition to a woman admitted, as the headline stated: “My new vagina won’t make me happy.” But the writer wanted to go ahead with the surgery anyway.

Jazz Jennings, 19, was born a biological male but socially transitioned to female years ago. The teen’s transgender journey has been a hit TLC show.

Doctors recently performed a third surgery on Jennings to further the transition from young man to young woman. Jennings suffered from severe complications after receiving a “new vagina.”

Walt Heyer is well known for his crusade against such medical transitions. Heyer, a fellow contributor to The Daily Signal, lived as a woman for several years. After taking female hormones, he had breast implants but was still suicidal after a short reprieve.

Eventually Heyer came to the belief not only that sex reassignment surgeries didn’t make him female, but that his issues were rooted in trauma and abuse—as they are for most people.

Heyer wrote in The Daily Signal in 2017:

Too many post-surgical patients contact me to report they deeply regret the gender change surgery and that the false hope of surgical outcomes was a factor. For children, the focus on encouraging, assisting, and affirming them toward changing genders at earlier and earlier ages, with no research showing the outcomes, may lead to more suicides.

Although it’s true that many conservatives would reject government involvement in the family via heavy-handed legislation, there are times when it’s necessary, specifically when safety—even common sense—is rejected in favor of the cause du jour.

This is such a time, when parents and activists are blindly answering the rallying cry of progressives who favor feelings over facts, even when it means leading our own children down a path of pain and regret.

COMMENTARY BY

Nicole Russell

Nicole Russell is a contributor to The Daily Signal. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, National Review, Politico, The Washington Times, The American Spectator, and Parents Magazine. Twitter: .

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Linda Sarsour Uses Nazi Tactic to Dehumanize Israelis

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Sharia-activist Linda Sarsour used a classic Nazi tactic employed against Jews when she urged her followers not to fall into the trap of “humanizing” Israelis. Dehumanization was a classic Nazi tactic used against Jews during World War II.

Sarsour made the comments while endorsing the many different anti-Israel strategies employed by activists. But the bottom line, she said, was,

“If you are on the side of the oppressor, or you are defending the oppressor or you are actually trying to humanize the oppressor, then that’s a problem, sisters and brothers, and we gotta be able to say that is not the position of the Muslim-American community.”

As noted in the tweet, British journalist Mehdi Hasan “nods along as Linda Sarsour warns against ‘humanizing’ Israelis.”

In addition, the tweeter, Stephen Knight, rightly comments, “The dehumanization of opponents is a bright red flag for anyone knowledgeable on extremism and fascism.”

Dehumanization was  a classic Nazi tactic used during World War II to turn the German people against the Jews, who were referred to as rats and vermin.

Psychologists warn that the first step in mass murder is to dehumanize the victim. In a talk titled “’Less Than Human’: The Psychology of Cruelty,” David Livingstone Smith, co-founder and director of the Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of New England, notes,

“[For the Nazis, Jews] were untermenschen — subhumans — and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It’s wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat.”

Sarsour’s comments came just before the United Nations published a blacklist of Israeli businesses that operate in Jewish areas located beyond the 1967 lines in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

As The Jerusalem Post noted, “Israel is the only country against which such a list has been complied of businesses suspected [of] breaking international law.”

There are close to 100 land disputes worldwide that have not been subject to a similar blacklist, which means that the UN action falls under the classic definition of anti-Semitism, i.e. treating Jews or Israel with different standards than other people or countries in the world.

This is the main reason why the U.S., as well many other countries have deemed the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel anti-Semitic at its core. Sarsour is a huge proponent of the BDS movement.

After a year-long legal investigation by the U.S. State Department, in November 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced, “The establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not, per se, inconsistent with international law.”

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EDITORS NOTE: This Clarion Project column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

To Prosper, Africans Must be Free to Innovate

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The African Union must focus on reducing the overbearing costs of intellectual property across the region.

Africa’s potential to flourish in the coming years is enormous. The newly-minted African Continental Free Trade Area(AfCFTA) is set to immediately get rid of 90 percent of tariffs on goods traded between member states upon its July 1 implementation, which will dramatically ramp up trade and add billions to the continent’s economy.

Already, 29 of the 55 African Union (AU) nations have ratified the agreement. But to truly reap the potential benefits of this new trade area, African states must drastically reform existing intellectual property laws in order to allow and encourage innovation among their citizenry.

A recent report from the Brookings Institution found that in 2017, African countries registered a mere 1,330 patents. This amount is a fraction of the 592,508 patents registered in Asia and the 116,359 registered in Europe in the same year. What’s more, the majority of patents in Africa are registered by non-residents—and that’s not the case in the rest of the world. As a continent with a young and increasingly educated population, it’s vital that Africans are free to innovate and reap the rewards for doing so.

As Francis Gurry, Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organisation, notes:

Africa has a great tradition of innovation and creativity and has extraordinary creative resources but has often struggled to realize their full economic potential.

The main reason this potential is hindered is because of the hefty costs of patent registration. Indeed, Africa has some of the steepest registration costs in the world.

In two of the continent’s fastest-growing economies, Kenya and Ethiopia, patent registration fees are a whopping 13 and eight times the national average income respectively. To put that in perspective, in the U.S., patent registration costs equate to just 0.1 times average incomes, and in Germany, just 0.3. African innovators, who are mostly young with either no job, or a low-paying job, therefore struggle to afford these exorbitant fees.

To make matters worse, in some cases, new technologies are required to be registered in every single country they enter, meaning further costs for entrepreneurs who are often already facing significant financial challenges. Making it easier for Africans to obtain patents would help the states’ and the overall region’s economies, as it would boost the production and export of higher-value goods, rather than having nations primarily reliant on exporting commodities.

Today, many African economies rely heavily on exporting raw materials. And for three-quarters of African nations, commodities (which are typically exported outside of the continent) account for at least 70 percent of their exports. This is bad news for African nations, as raw materials are especially prone to price fluctuations, so reliance on commodities risks economic volatility, and creates unstable business environments.

However, when African states trade with one another, the goods traded are almost three times more likely to be higher-valued manufactured products, when compared to the goods that leave the continent. And as one of the main aims of the AfCFTA is to increase intra-regional trade, the enormous barriers to entry posed by large patent registration fees must be reformed in order for the continent to harness the talents of innovators and boost the trade of such manufactured and technological goods.

Indeed, the benefits of lowering the cost of patent registration have already been demonstrated in a variety of outliers across the continent. Botswana, Tanzania, and South Africa, for example, all have patent registration costs far below the African average, and partly as a result, have a much more diverse export market, which helps create a more stable business environment.

Phase I of the AfCFTA negotiations, which largely focused on removing concessions for goods traded intra-continentally, are coming to a close. The AU is now starting to look ahead at Phase II, which will largely focus on competition policy and, perhaps most importantly, intellectual property rights.

As Phase II draws closer, the AU must focus on reducing the overbearing costs of intellectual property across the region. Without a universal set cost, or unilateral lowering of patent registration fees, it seems the AfCFTA’s goal of drastically boosting intra-regional trade will be harder to achieve.

By reducing the costs of patents, African innovators will be free to reap the rewards of their innovations without being crippled by burdensome governmental regulation. If the AU fails to address this growing problem, intellectual property rights on the continent will remain something typically enjoyed by wealthy foreigners, and that’s not a future Africa should strive for.

This article is republished with permission from the Pulse by Business Insider. 

COLUMN BY

Alexander Hammond

Alexander C. R. Hammond is a researcher at a Washington D.C. think tank and Senior Fellow for African Liberty. He is also a Young Voices contributor and frequently writes about economic freedom, African development, and globalization.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

The Prosecution of Roger Stone by an Overzealous and Politicized Justice Department

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“The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision.  It is a silent acquiescence to evil.  The tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.”  –  Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

“When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” –  Thomas Jefferson

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” – Elie Wiesel

“Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.” –  Julian Assange

President Trump tweeted minutes after Stone’s conviction, “Now they have convicted Roger Stone for lying to Congress and want to give him a long prison term. What about Crooked Hillary, Comey, Strzok and Page who helped launch Crossfire Hurricane, McCabe, Brennan, Clapper, Schiff, Ohr, Steele and Mueller himself who all lied and have not been prosecuted. This is double standard like never seen before in our country.”

No charges against any of them, or any charges against the treachery committed by Hillary Clinton whose home server was hacked in real time by Red China and other foreign nations for classified government documents.  And corrupt cop Comey set her free on the request of Attorney General Loretta Lynch who met with Bill on the tarmac in a Phoenix airport.

The President is right, all of them lied under oath to Congress about consequential matters.  Yet, Judge Amy Berman Jackson specifically prohibited Stone defense lawyers from arguing that Stone’s case was one of “selective prosecution.”  (Trump suggested a pardon for Mr. Stone after he heard the harsh and drastic punitive sentencing.)

Roger Stone needs our help.  Please consider donating to his legal defense fund at StoneDefenseFund.com.

The Stone prosecution is a disgrace, it’s lawless, and it was rigged from the beginning.

Excessive Punishment

Judge Jackson put Paul Manafort in solitary confinement for nine months before he was even convicted.  At his age, the man was sentenced to die in prison, and that’s what they want to do to Roger Stone.  The prosecutions’ recommendation of seven to nine years for a 67-year-old, non-violent first offender has finally revealed Robert Mueller’s prosecution team for the corrupt Deep State monsters they are.

Stone did nothing that was of a criminal nature that threatened the people of this country or violated the laws that helped the Trump campaign win an allegedly “illegal election.”  His only crime was supporting Donald J. Trump for President, just like Lt. General Michael T. Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and so many others.

Roger Stone was charged with obstruction of justice and making false statements to the special counsel. Significantly, the alleged false statements specified in the indictment were about conduct, which, if admitted, was not criminal.

On January 23, 2019, Mueller’s office illegally leaked Roger Stone’s indictment, written by Andrew Weissmann, to CNN. The illegal leak is a bigger crime that carries a heavier penalty than what Stone was charged with. See the entire Mueller timeline.

Mueller’s witch hunt was closed last May, although several prosecutors had remained behind to handle cases like Stone’s — prompting conservative commentators to openly wonder if politics had motivated their desire for an especially harsh sentence for Stone.

Prosecutors Resign

Timothy Shea is the new interim U.S. attorney for the D.C. office replacing Jessie Liu. Liu’s office oversaw prosecutions including those against Trump associates Paul Manafort, General Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone.

President Trump withdrew his nomination of Liu to serve as a top Treasury Department official.  She had worked in Justice during the Bush administration and became a member of Trump’s transition team and was appointed U.S. Attorney for DC.

Last year, AG Barr tried to promote her to the number three slot in justice, but that plan was thwarted by Senator Mike Lee. As it turned out, Liu was a pro-abort and she had opposed the confirmation of Samuel Alito. Senator Lee and AG Barr actually got into a shouting match when Liu was blocked for not being conservative.

The president’s move to withdraw Liu’s nomination comes just hours after four Justice Department lawyers quit following a move by senior leaders at the department to overrule the prosecutors’ judgment by seeking a lesser sentence for long-time Trump ally Roger Stone after he was found guilty of lying to Congress.

Timothy Shea is a former close adviser to AG Barr.  As a top Barr aide, Shea helped manage the Epstein crisis and oversee the lingering Mueller Cases in D.C.  As explained in my previous article, the entire Mueller drama was unnecessary and everyone knew it; the goal was to destroy those who had supported Donald Trump in order to discredit him.

Front-line prosecutors, two previously with Mueller’s team, argued for a sentence on the higher end for Stone than some of their supervisors were comfortable with, according to people familiar with the discussions.  Just as interestingly, the newly appointed U.S. Attorney, Shea, approved this aggressive stance, though not without some pushback.  The judge actually does the sentencing, the prosecutors only suggest punishment.

Four career DOJ prosecutors, abruptly resigned from their posts on Tuesday, February 10th in an apparent dramatic protest just hours after senior leaders at the DOJ said they would take the extraordinary step of effectively overruling the prosecutors’ judgment by seeking a lesser sentence for President Trump’s former adviser Roger Stone.

Jonathan Kravis, Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed and Michael Marando all withdrew.  Jed and Zelensky were prosecutors who worked for Robert Mueller.  All four quit in a crybaby huff because they weren’t getting their way.  Well, good riddance!

After the withdrawals by other attorneys, the DOJ’s new sentencing memo in Stone’s case was signed only by John Crabb Jr., the acting head of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, DC.

Former acting Attorney General, Matt Whitaker said, “There is no precedent for a harsh sentence recommendation for Roger Stone.” The sentencing judgment was draconian for the conviction.  The average time a rapist spends in prison is four years, an armed robber serves three years and for violent assault, one and half years. Link

Nowhere on the web can anyone even find what Stone lied to Congress about! The prosecution’s desire to imprison Stone for seven to nine years is more than vicious, it’s despotic.

DOJ Alters Sentence

The decision to alter the sentencing recommendation was made before President Trump’s tweet, said Kerri Kupec, the director of DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs. Kupec said the DOJ has had no contact with the White House regarding the sentencing recommendation.

The democrats went into their typical Trump Derangement Syndrome hysteria and threatened another impeachment with Schiff accusing Trump of an “abuse of power.”

Speaker Pelosi, (D-CA) repeated the tired and preposterous meme.  Rep. Eric Swalwell, (D-CA) a chronic impeachment enthusiast, refused to rule out another attempt to remove Trump from office.  The unhinged harangues were all predicated on a brazen assumption that Trump had directed AG Barr to overrule the trial prosecutors and recommend a more appropriate and equitable sentence for Stone, which by the way, he has the right to do.  The deranged left is angry at Trump for exposing the wrongdoing.

Pelosi’s gang of psychotic lunatics are now using Barr as a political punching bag, and unfortunately Trump’s tweets made it worse.

Barr Complains About Tweets

AG Barr publicly complained that Trump’s tweets make it difficult for him to do his job.  He told ABC News, “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody … whether it’s Congress, a newspaper editorial board, or the president.  Well, as you know, the Stone case was prosecuted while I was attorney general. And I supported it. I think it was established, he was convicted of obstructing Congress and witness tampering. And I thought that was a righteous prosecution. And I was happy that he was convicted.”  Well, if Barr thinks this is a righteous case, then where are indictments for McCabe and Comey?  AG Barr stressed, however, that the president never asked him to interfere in the criminal case against Stone, a longtime friend of the president.

Barr was disrespectful of our president and his first amendment rights; Donald J. Trump is the boss, not Bill Barr. Tweeting is how the President communicates with the American people.  The AG should have had a private meeting with President Trump rather than voicing his disapproval publicly.  Link

Two-Tiered Justice

A prime example of two-tiered justice is the reason the president withdrew his nomination of Jessie Liu.  During her time as U.S. attorney she helped a man by the name of James Wolfe get away with leaking classified information and ultimately lying to the FBI.

Wolfe was the former security director for the Senate Intelligence Committee. He was indicted in 2018 for leaking info to four journalists including one with whom he was having an affair.   He lied to the FBI and according to his indictment Wolfe picked up a highly classified document on the 17th of March to take to the intel committee.  A later FBI sentencing recommendation confirms that that document contained the first two Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants for Carter Page and was the foundation for accelerated “Spygate.”

So, what happened to James Wolfe?  He was never charged with leaking classified information.  Politico reports that during the lame duck session after the 2018 midterms, Senators Warner, Richard Burr and Diane Feinstein asked for leniency in his case and that’s where Jessie Liu comes back into the case.  Link

Also, on March 17, Democratic Senator, Intel committee chairman, Sen. Mark Warner texted Christopher Steele’s attorney, Adam Waldman, that he was “going into the skiff.” (The skiff is a secure room.) What did they talk about?  March 17th is also the date stamped on the released FISA warrants that allowed the spying to begin on Carter Page.  And from that, it is fair to say that James Wolfe took custody of the Carter Page FISA applications and delivered them to the skiff where they were reviewed by Senator Warner and then leaked to the press by James Wolfe.

It was Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein and U.S. Attorney for DC Jessie Liu who were the decision-makers.  U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu dropped most of the charges against Wolfe; she allowed him to plead guilty to only one count of lying to investigators.  Wolfe served exactly two months in prison.  Did Liu help coverup the Wolfe case?  It sure looks like it. Remember, two months in prison.  The President has pulled the nomination of Jessie Liu, and it’s not because of Roger Stone.

The disparity in treatment of those connected to President Trump is shocking when one considers the leniency to James Wolfe via the democrat senators requests.  Consider that none of the people responsible for the phony Russian collusion story have been prosecuted.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz filed criminal referrals against former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. AG Barr refused to indict, and no action has been taken against them.

IG Horowitz determined that officials at the FBI and Justice Department deceived the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and obtained illegal warrants without probable cause in order to spy on a Trump campaign associate. So far, no one has been held accountable.

Conclusion

And oh yes, it was Roger Stone who came up with Make America Great Again (MAGA)!  On September 16, 2011, Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political advisor and a veteran of Reagan’s 1980 campaign, tweeted the slogan, “Make America Great Again -Trump Huckabee 2012.” Two months later, in December 2011, Trump made a statement in which he said he was unwilling to rule out running as a presidential candidate in the future, explaining “I must leave all of my options open because, above all else, we must make America great again.”

© All rights reserved.

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Parkland Dad, Andrew Pollack: “March for Our Lives” Made Kids LESS SAFE

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Andrew Pollack is the father of Meadow Pollack, a victim of the Parkland mass murderer.  He works to get the truth out while gun control zealots work to hide the truth by blaming guns.  This courageous story is a must read for those who really want to know the truth.

Parkland Dad Andrew Pollack: ‘March for Our Lives’ Made America’s Kids Less Safe

By Andrew Pollack

Breitbart

February 14, 2020

Two years ago today, my daughter Meadow and sixteen others were murdered in the Parkland school shooting. For the families of the victims, it was an unspeakable tragedy. But for others, it was an incredible political opportunity.

The shooting propelled a handful of shrill student activists to fame. The most prominent one, David Hogg, later mused, “We really only remember a few hundred people, if that many, out of the billions that have ever lived. Is that what I was destined to become?”

No, David. My daughter wasn’t murdered so that you could fulfill your “destiny” of tweeting about historically marginalized “indigenous lgbtq women and non binary” gun control activists.

She was murdered because of the failures of the Broward County school district, sheriff’s office, and mental health services. Failures that partisan agitprop, spewed by you and the other March For Our Lives (MFOL) activists, helped to shield from the public eye.

Although I disagreed with the gun control kids politically, I made it a rule not to criticize them publicly. Because I figured that despite our differences, we all wanted the same thing: safe schools…

Read the full story here.

Court victory for UK ‘transphobia’ delinquent

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Tweeting rhymes against transgenderism is allowed in a non-Orwellian state, says a judge.

Former British police officer Harry Miller has successfully challenged the use of Hate Crime Operational guidelines, issued by the College of Policing in 2014 and followed by police forces nationally.

A Judge found that they had been unlawfully used to interfere with Mr Miller’s freedom of speech when he was visited by a policeman to question him over a “transphobic limerick” he shared on Twitter.

The guidelines deal with actions “perceived to be motivated by hostility towards religion, race or transgender identity,” which must be recorded “irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element.”

Although the police accepted that “such incidents are not crimes, they are still logged on a system and can show up during a criminal records check” when an individual applies for a job.

In a landmark ruling at the High Court, Mr Justice Julian Knowles ruled the tweets were lawful, and that there was not “the slightest risk” that Mr Miller “would commit a criminal offence by continuing to tweet.” The judge added that the UK has never been an “Orwellian society,” nor had it experienced “a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi.” (“Judge rules in favour of free speech in ‘transphobic’ limerick case,” Telegraph, February 15, 2020).

But precisely because we have never lived in a police state – rather, having been used to a political system in which open debate brings about changes in the law and in society by democratic means – we have been slow to recognise the threat of fundamental changes introduced by stealth, incrementally and promoting apparently benign measures.

Coming from different angles, in fact it was a pincer movement conducted by social campaigners on one side and legal activists on the other, in whose grip the majority are suddenly finding themselves trapped.

After his self-funded challenge, Mr Miller celebrated his victory outside court, hailing the outcome as a “watershed moment for liberty” and vowing to continue tweeting. However, Mr Justice Knowles rejected his wider challenge to the lawfulness of the College of Policing’s guidance, ruling that it “serves legitimate purpose and is not disproportionate.”’

The case will now be tested at the Supreme Court after Mr Justice Knowles granted a “leapfrog certificate” to allow it to skip the Court of Appeal stage, but as the Telegraph points out, although “scathing in his judgment of Mr Miller’s treatment,” Mr Justice Knowles “defended the College of Policing’s guidelines on ‘non-crime hate incidents’,” even though they are the source of the problem.

The guidelines speak of incidents that are “perceived … to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice” and which are to be recorded “irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element.”

Moreover, although “the police say they are working hard and that they just do not have the money or time to attend every crime scene,” they are putting huge efforts into “recording non-crimes”. The Government has pledged to introduce 20,000 new police officers, but “the Home Office must make sure that they are deployed to tackle actual crime, not people’s opinions.” (Telegraph comment, “Non-crimes should not waste police time,” February 15, 2020).

Thanks to Freedom of Information requests made by the Telegraph – and cited in court by Mr Miller – it has emerged that ‘nearly 120,000 “non-crime” hate incidents were recorded by police forces between 2014 and 2019.

Mr Miller was investigated by PC Mansoor Gul, a “community cohesion officer” who said Mr Miller needed to “check his thinking” – at which point, he says, he knew the police had gone too far. He told The Telegraph the incident was indicative of the growing “political corruption” of British policing, recalling strict instructions, during his time in the force, when policing public marches “to not even step in time with the music in case it gave the impression of being political,” although now they are doing the complete opposite. “I even have one picture of a British police officer carrying a riot shield painted in the trans flag colours.” (“’Don’t tell me to check my thinking … that is not the job of the police’,” Telegraph, February 15, 2020).

PC Gul disputes Mr Miller’s claim, but in fact it is the police that need to “check their thinking” – even check whether they are still thinking. For several years now, uniformed police have marched in Gay Pride marches. Far from fostering community cohesion, they have been dragged in to become enforcers of sexual diversity, thereby setting the majority against a tiny number of troubled individuals, at the behest of their self-appointed champions.

It is said that he who pays the piper calls the tune, but although the public pays for policing they do not pay to be policed; it is the sexual diversity campaign that is calling the tune to which the police are marching in lockstep. And the Supreme Court, which will hear Mr Miller’s case and may reject it, thus entrenching intolerance in law, has shown its left-liberal bias regarding Brexit.

In 2010 the Equality Act introduced legal protections on the basis of race and disability – things that cannot be helped – but also sexual activity and identity – things that can be helped.

Recently, an employment tribunal judge ruled that the view of tax expert Maya Forstater, who expressed criticism of trans issues online, was not “a protected philosophical belief under the 2010 Equality Act,” that there was “no legal right to question whether a transgender person is a man or a woman,” and that Ms Forstater’s belief was ‘“not worthy of respect in a democratic society’.” (“Test case rules against tax expert sacked over transgender tweet,” Telegraph, December 19, 2019).

An Orwellian situation has morphed into a Kafkaesque one, where no one knows exactly what they are accused of and no one knows exactly what they are allowed to say – consequently the safest course is to say nothing on the subject. The activists who police other people’s speech are the ones who decide who is guilty and who is innocent, and they can be as offensive as they like – nobody will investigate them.

Indeed, although the police guidelines purport to protect religion, anyone quoting the Bible or citing it in defence of traditional Christian beliefs on sexuality, is in danger of being arrested or sacked.

We have gone from true tolerance – where everyone has a right to their opinion – to the self-identifying policers of public speech believing that only their opinion is the truth. Of course, though everyone has a right to their opinion, everyone’s opinion cannot be right, but it does help to be backed up by medical science. In the case of trans issues this is entirely lacking, yet we have come to a point where, in the face of biological evidence, a tiny number of individuals who believe themselves to be the opposite sex, must be believed.

Indeed, their beliefs must be affirmed and even celebrated, as clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson found in 2017 when he refused to refer to individuals in line with their chosen gender. He famously protested an Ontario Human Rights Commission ruling that “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity” in a workplace or a school, would probably be considered discrimination.”

Peterson argued that his objections were on the grounds of free speech, and nothing to do with discrimination, and that at no time in British Common Law history has the legal code mandated what we must say, as opposed to what we must not say. He did add that “he would use the gender-neutral pronoun of a particular person, if they asked him.” (Mick Brown, “What’s wrong with the Petersons?” Telegraph, February 15, 2020).

In a very short time we have gone from policing speech to censoring speech to compelled speech, but even those who defend the right to free speech fall silent on the issue of banning silent prayer outside abortion clinics.

This is chiefly because the defenders of free speech are on the Left, and although on trans issues they have truth on their side, the strongest party will win if politicians continue to back the trans campaign. In this war of words, the trans fascists will succeed in silencing every mention of the issue apart from fulsome praise for all things trans.

The anti-trans campaigners reject dire warnings that criticism can be hurtful, insisting that “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. In this case, however, the words of the trans activists will not only hurt the right to free speech, but kill it off entirely.

COLUMN BY

ANN FARMER

Ann Farmer lives in the UK. She is the author of By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign (CUAP, 2008); The Language of Life: Christians Facing the Abortion Challenge (St Pauls, 1995), and Prophets & Priests: the Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement (St Austin Press, 2002).

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Granddaughter of Slaying Victim, 92, Backs Trump’s Fight Against Illegal-Immigrant ‘Sanctuaries’

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VIDEO:

Daria Ortiz’s voice cracked when speaking at a White House event Friday, as she described how New York City’s “sanctuary city” status let her family—and the rest of the city’s residents—down.

Her 92-year-old grandmother, Maria Fuertes, a legal immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was sexually assaulted and killed last month, and police have charged illegal immigrant and alleged repeat criminal offender Reeaz Khan, 21.

Khan, from Guyana, was previously arrested on assault charges, but the city released him, despite an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer request.

Sanctuary jurisdictions are cities, counties, and states that provide a safe haven for illegal immigrants—in some cases, dangerous criminals—and obstruct federal immigration enforcement. That usually comes in the form of ignoring ICE detainer orders, except when there is a court order.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

“Before coming to America, [Fuertes] worked as a secretary for the president in her native country, the Dominican Republic. She is a shining example of people who come legally to this country, work hard and do the right thing, and are law-abiding citizens,” Ortiz said. “My grandmother raised her children and her grandchildren while working hard to give us a future.”

Ortiz stood with President Donald Trump in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, speaking to a crowd of about 220 U.S. Border Patrol agents and family members at a gathering of the National Border Patrol Council, the agents’ union.

During the event, Trump spoke about his administration’s immigration policies, the border wall, and cracking down on sanctuary jurisdictions.

The Justice Department recently filed lawsuits against the states of California and New Jersey, as well as against King County, Washington. All three lawsuits argue that the states and the county have violated the Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the Constitution, contending the jurisdictions are flouting federal immigration laws.

“Unfortunately, my grandmother had to be the example of why something like this horrific crime should never happen,” Ortiz said, adding:

Our family’s hope is that her death was not in vain and that preventative measures are put into place to ensure that nothing like this happens to anyone again.

The tragedy in all of this is the fact that this could have been avoided had there been no sanctuary law.

She then talked about Khan, the defendant, facing seven charges, including second-degree murder, first-degree manslaughter, first-degree attempted rape, first-degree sexual abuse, and tampering with physical evidence.

“The man that is responsible for this should have never had the opportunity to do this, had his multiple offenses not been ignored,” Ortiz said, adding:

The system not only failed our family, but it failed our city. Our family would like to thank the administration for acknowledging my family’s tragedy and extending their concern.

Trump, who introduced Ortiz, returned to the podium and called for Congress to pass legislation that would allow the families of victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants to sue municipalities over sanctuary laws.

A bill to do just that, the Justice for Victims of Sanctuary Cities Act, was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and a companion House bill was introduced by Rep. Ted Budd, R-N.C., last summer. No action has taken place on either bill, according to Congress.gov.

“Not one more American life should be stolen by sanctuary cities,” the president said. “They are all over the place, and a lot of people don’t want them. Many, many communities don’t want them in California. The politicians want them for whatever reason.”

The California Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom made it the nation’s first sanctuary state.

“That’s why we are calling on Congress to pass legislation giving American victims the right to sue sanctuary cities and hold them accountable for the suffering and the damages that they’ve caused,” Trump said.

“American citizens are entitled to safe neighborhoods and safe streets that, really, the people in this room have provided when given the opportunity,” he said, referring to the Border Patrol agents at the event. “The sanctuary cities are not really giving that opportunity.”

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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China’s Hidden Influence in America

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

On Presidents Day, Remembering Why We Have a Strong Commander in Chief

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On Presidents Day, we celebrate the life and accomplishments of our first president, George Washington, the father of our country, and Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president and one of our most renowned statesmen.

On that day, Feb. 17 this year, we should remember that the Framers of the Constitution wanted to ensure that an American president—such as Washington and Lincoln—would have the power to defend the country when the safety, security, and independence of its people are threatened.

And that power is exactly what they gave the president in the Constitution when they made him the commander in chief of our military forces.

This is particularly important given recent legislation passed by the House of Representatives, a so-called “war powers resolution.” It condemned President Donald Trump for ordering the lawful targeting of an Iranian general, terrorist mastermind Qassim Suleimani, and ordered Trump to stop using all military force against Iran without prior congressional approval.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Iran has been a longtime state sponsor of terrorism, according to our own State Department, and Suleimani made himself a target. He was a mass murderer responsible for thousands of deaths, including hundreds of Americans.

On a recent trip through Pennsylvania, I was reminded of what Americans have suffered at the hands of terrorists and the importance of having a commander in chief with broad constitutional authority to react immediately to threats against the nation.

On a cold, icy day, my wife and I stopped at the Flight 93 National Memorial, which honors the 33 passengers and seven crew members of United Flight 93 who died when their Boeing 757 airliner crashed into a field just outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 11, 2001.

We all know what happened on 9/11. Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners. They flew two into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and flew the third into the Pentagon, murdering almost 3,000 people.

The fourth flight was United Flight 93. It took off from Newark, New Jersey, headed for San Francisco with four hijackers on board masquerading as passengers. Forty-six minutes into the flight, they attacked the captain and first officer, took over the controls of the airplane, and changed direction to head for Washington, D.C.

Half an hour later, the plane crashed upside down at 563 miles per hour into the field where the memorial is today.

We know what happened in that critical half-hour not only from the cockpit voice recorder recovered by authorities at the horrendous crash site, but from the 37 telephone calls to, and voicemail messages left with, the friends and families of the passengers on the flight.

Through those phone calls, the passengers learned of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and quickly realized why the hijackers were headed for Washington.

The passengers made a collective decision, took a vote, and decided to attempt to retake the plane. Among the passengers was Todd Beamer, an Oracle account manager who was the father of two sons, David and Andrew, and whose wife, Lisa, was pregnant with their third child.

A born leader, Beamer decided to take matters into his own hands and fight back. Before leading other passengers in a final fight against the terrorists, he called flight dispatch and spoke with Lisa Jefferson. He asked her to say the Lord’s Prayer with him.

After praying with her, Beamer uttered his famous words, “Let’s roll,” to his fellow passengers. The cockpit recorder captured the shouts, crashes, and sounds of the melee that occurred when the passengers attacked, including one who yelled, “Let’s get them!”

The 9/11 Commission concluded that the hijackers crashed the plane when they realized that the passengers were only seconds away from overcoming them and taking back control of the plane.

The Flight 93 National Memorial, just like the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York and the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, is deeply affecting. Set in a bucolic, quiet Pennsylvania field, the memorial is a solemn reminder of the ravages of terrorism and the triumph of ordinary heroes over evil incarnate.

It is impossible to view, listen to, and read the personal stories of the individual passengers on that flight without being greatly moved and greatly angered. The stories explain what has happened on the plane and what the passengers plan to do about it even as they say farewell to their loved ones.

These average, ordinary Americans took on four jihadist hijackers at the cost of their own lives. They prevented those terrorists from what would have been a devastating attack on a notable location in Washington, most likely the U.S. Capitol or the White House. The Flight 93 crash site is only 18 minutes flying time from Washington.

There is no need to rehash what happened after 9/11, including the immediate steps that President George W. Bush took to safeguard the country and to go after the terrorists who had sponsored, financed, and planned the attack on America. But Bush’s actions illustrate how important it was then, and is today, that our Constitution provides for a strong commander in chief.

As the Justice Department said in a 2001 legal opinion, no law and no congressional resolution “can place any limits on the President’s determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the president alone to make.”

That is a good thing.

So while we are celebrating Washington, who led an eight-year fight for our liberty, and Lincoln, who fought to stop the breakup of the Union, we also should be thankful for other presidents who used the strong power of the executive to protect the nation.

That includes President Franklin Roosevelt, who led us in the largest war in our history against two brutal tyrannies, as well as Bush, who acted decisively after the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.

Trump also should be applauded for taking out a terrorist thug who had American blood on his hands, and who would have continued to kill Americans.

Americans just like those who died on United Flight 93 when it crashed in what the National Park Service appropriately calls “a field of honor forever” in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

COMMENTARY BY

Hans von Spakovsky

Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Read his research. Twitter: .

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The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

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Rutgers: Jewish Democrat thrown out of Muslims4Peace event for calling Rashida Tlaib antisemitic

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At virtually every university in the country, the academic establishment will use its thuggish cops to cosset and protect Leftists and Islamic supremacists from the slightest negative word. Institutions of higher learning? Hardly. They’re Antifa factories, centers of hard-Left indoctrination.

“Jewish Democrat Thrown Out of ‘Muslims4Peace’ Event for Calling Rashida Tlaib Antisemitic,” by Penny Starr, Breitbart, February 11, 2020:

Former New York State Democrat lawmaker Dov Hikind was tossed out of an event after confronting Rep. Rashida Tlaib (R-MI) on her past antisemitic remarks.

“Police just ejected me from an event of @Muslims4Peace at @RutgersU which was a fine event until @RashidaTlaib showed up. I challenged her about her antisemitism and spreading of an anti-Jewish blood libel! She had no answer for me,” Hikind tweeted. “They will never silence us!”

The crowd started shouting “Rashida!” “Rashida!” as Hikind was escorted out of the room.

The Daily Wire spoke to Hikind about attending the Muslims4Peace-sponsored event that was held over the weekend at Rutgers University.

The event was entitled “A Global Crisis: Refugees, Migrants, and Asylum Seekers – Lessons from the Prophet Muhammad,” according to the Daily Wire:

“As [Tlaib] started to speak about ‘showing up for allies,’ I decided it was time to take her to task for her recent promotion of an anti-Jewish blood libel,” Hikind said. “I stood up and asked her ‘what about your antisemitism? What about your spreading of a blood libel?’”

“And before I could finish my question, one man jumped at me and grabbed me,” Hikind continued. “I warned him to immediately get his hands off and he complied. The police were waiting on the sidelines and jumped in a second later and forcibly removed me. They did their job, and I have no qualms with them. But Rashida couldn’t answer me to my face.”

“I stood ten feet away from her, and all she could do was play the victim,” Hikind continued. “I was told that after I was escorted out she claimed that my question was part of a pattern of discrimination against people like her grandmother. In reality, she’s a shameless anti-Semite who hides her hate behind the guise of victimhood although she’s the only one consistently guilty of perpetuating hate. She’s the one guilty of promoting libelous lies that lead directly to violence! At the end of it all, Rashida showed us again that she has no backbone and has no real defense or justification for her abhorrent statements.”…

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Margaret Sanger and the Racist Roots of Planned Parenthood

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Recently, Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest (R-N.C.) came under fire for comments he made regarding Planned Parenthood and its founder, Margaret Sanger. Speaking to an MLK Day breakfast at Upper Room Church of God in Christ in Raleigh, Forest said this: “There is no doubt that when Planned Parenthood was created, it was created to destroy the entire black race. That was the purpose of Planned Parenthood. That’s the truth.” Forest later defended his comments to McClatchy News: “The facts speak for themselves. Since 1973, 19 million black babies have been aborted, mostly by Planned Parenthood. I care too much about the lives of these babies to debate the intent of Sanger’s views when the devastation she brought into this world is obvious.”

Margaret Sanger, her sister, Ethel Byrne, and Fania Mindell opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York on October 16, 1916. The clinic was later raided by the NYPD, and all three women were arrested and charged with violating the Comstock Act for distributing obscene materials. After laws governing birth control were relaxed, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, which was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.

While Lieutenant Governor Forest was attacked by many on the Left for pushing an uneducated, insensitive agenda, history backs him up. The fact is that Margaret Sanger strongly believed the Aryan race to be superior and that it must be purified, a view that finds its roots from Charles Darwin’s defense of evolution in The Origin of Species. Darwin argued that a process of “natural selection” favored the white race over all other “lesser races.” Sanger advocated for eugenics by calling for abortion and birth control among the “unfit” to produce a master race, a race consisting solely of wealthy, educated whites. Sanger said she believed blacks were “human weeds” that needed to be exterminated. She also referred to immigrants, African Americans, and poor people as “reckless breeders” and “spawning…human beings who never should have been born.”

Sanger once wrote “that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.” In an effort to sell her birth control and abortion proposals to the black community, Sanger said: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” In 1926, Sanger was also the featured speaker at a women’s auxiliary meeting of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

Sanger opened her clinics in largely minority neighborhoods because she believed immigrants and the working class were inferior and needed their population controlled so as to purify the human race. That trend continues today where almost 80 percent of Planned Parenthood facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. In fact, although only 13 percent of American women are black, over 35 percent of all black babies are aborted in the United States every year. Abortion is the leading cause of death for blacks in the United States. According to Students for Life of America, “more African-Americans have died from abortion than from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined.” Black babies are about five times more likely to be aborted than whites. On Halloween in 2017, Planned Parenthood’s “Black Community” Twitter account tweeted: “If you’re a Black woman in America, it’s statistically safer to have an abortion than to carry a pregnancy to term or give birth.”

While Margaret Sanger tried to portray Planned Parenthood as a merciful organization that helps needy families, the facts speak for themselves. In her testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in September 2015, former Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards openly admitted that over 80 percent of her organization’s annual revenue comes from performing abortions and not basic health care for poor or disadvantaged women. When you dive deeper, well over 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s annual revenue comes from performing abortions.

Despite this sordid history, Margaret Sanger is almost universally recognized as a pioneer for women’s rights rather than the racist she actually was. When accepting Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that she “admired Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision…I am really in awe of her.” Those like Hillary Clinton are ignoring the explicitly racist statements that Margaret Sanger made throughout her life. The fact is that Sanger normalized birth control and abortion in the United States as a means to accomplish eugenics. Her ultimate goal was to eliminate non-white races, people with sickness or disabilities, children born to felons, the poor, and immigrants, to name a few.

Margaret Sanger is no heroine, and Planned Parenthood is not some merciful health care provider as the Left paints it to be. Margaret Sanger repeatedly stated her racist intentions for the whole world to see and hear, and Planned Parenthood was and still is the manifestation of those racist ideologies. America was founded on the idea that no matter your race, creed, national origin, disability, or station in life, everyone who comes here or is born here has the opportunity to live a successful, fulfilling life. Margaret Sanger didn’t believe that.

As pro-life activists, we must do our part to expose Margaret Sanger for who she really was. We must also expose the racist history of Planned Parenthood and how that history is still relevant today. For more information on Margaret Sanger and the racist roots of Planned Parenthood, check out these FRC resources: Planned Parenthood Is Not Pro-Woman and The Real Planned Parenthood: Leading the Culture of Death.

COLUMN BY

Worth Loving

RELATED ARTICLE: Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger In Her Own Words

EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

PODCAST: Nike Swooshes in to Attack Women’s Sports

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First, they attacked America. Then adoption. Now, women. Honestly, with such a busy schedule of political extremism, it’s a mystery how Nike has time to sell anything. But for all of the company’s radical campaigns, it’s Nike’s latest that’s really raising eyebrows. The retail titan is picking a side in the transgender sports debate — and it isn’t girls’.

Just how beholden is Big Business to LGBT activists? Well, one of the biggest manufacturers of international sports equipment just told half its market that it doesn’t care about the future of women’s sports. So much for Nike’s progressive feminist cred. In Tennessee, one of the states that’s considering a ban on biological boys competing against girls, the company actually suggested that keeping a level playing field for girls “put[s] our collective economic success at risk.” If anything puts our economic success at risk, it’s destroying 50 percent of high school, collegiate, and pro sports!

And yet, Nike, like 142 other businesses, is actively working to stop Tennessee (and at least six other states) from fighting the injustice of transgender sports. “I fully support them for being true to themselves and having the courage to do what they believe in,” Connecticut track star Selena Soule says of her male competition. But athletics is “an entirely different situation. It’s scientifically proven that males are built to be physically stronger than females. It’s unfair to put someone who is biologically a male, who has not undergone anything in terms of hormone therapy, against cis-gender girls… It’s upsetting when we work hard all season and put in a lot of effort, only to turn up at the state meets and get beat by someone who is biologically a male and lose state championships over this.”

And these boys aren’t just stealing trophies, they’re stealing scholarships too. With the Olympics around the corner and the debate exploding across the sports world, even athletes who’ve identified as gay or lesbian are calling the trend what it is: cheating. Tennis pro Martina Navratilova has been a great ally for the LGBT movement, but she had no problem blasting the radical ideology that’s killing sports and healthy competition. “It’s punishing the innocent,” she wrote indignantly, “and it’s insane.”

If there is a silver lining to this gender lunacy, it’s that more people are starting to see the quandary that’s created by policies and decisions that aren’t based in anatomical realities but emotional whims. This week, Selena — along with two other cross-country runners, Chelsea Mitchell and Alanna Smith — are suing to take back their sports. “Our dream is not to come in second or third place, but to win fair and square,” Mitchell said. “All we’re asking for is a fair chance.”

For these three girls, and so many others across the country, it’s upsetting to know the outcome of the race before it starts. And just because someone believes they’re a girl doesn’t mean their bodies act like one. “Forcing girls to be spectators in their own sports is completely at odds with Title IX,” their Alliance Defending Freedom attorney, Christiana Holcomb, pointed out. “Connecticut’s policy violates that law and reverses nearly 50 years of advances for women.”

The issue has created such an unlikely coalition of feminists, liberals, conservatives, and parents that Congressman Greg Steube (R-Fla.) introduced a federal bill to make it clear that biology — not political correctness — should determine your team. “…Even people on the far-Left — [including] famous players [are] saying that it’s not fair that women are having to compete against men in women’s sports.” And while extremists may call that insensitive, the facts speak for themselves. “Males have 30 times more testosterone than females. That obviously helps make men’s bodies bigger and stronger… It’s just crazy to me that we’re even having to file bills on something like this. But that’s the world that we live in today, unfortunately.”

Tony Perkins’s Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.