Right blasts leftist and Arab protest in Tel Aviv - Hezki Baruch

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by Hezki Baruch

Angry reactions to leftist and Arab demonstration in which PLO flags were raised in the heart of Tel Aviv.

Demonstration against Nationality Law in Tel Aviv
Kobi Richter/TPS

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Saturday night responded on Twitter to the leftist demonstration against the Nationality Law in Tel Aviv, in which participants waved Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) flags.

"There is no better evidence of the necessity of the Nationality Law. We will continue to raise the flag of Israel with pride and to sing ‘Hatkiva’ with great pride," Netanyahu wrote.
Minister Uri Ariel (Jewish Home) said, "Those who participated in tonight’s demonstration with PLO flags are the ones who harm our citizens, kill and injure our soldiers and burn our fields. I suggest that they go to Ramallah and Damascus and the sooner the better.”

Transportation and Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz (Likud) said that "Palestinian flags are being hoisted tonight at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, in protest against the Nationality Law. [Joint List MKs] Ahmed Tibi and Ayman Odeh and their friends are protesting against the Jewish nation and in favor of the Arab-Palestinian nation. It is not the words in the law that bother them, but rather the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. They will continue to demonstrate and we will continue to build and strengthen the State of Israel."

Minister Ze’ev Elkin (Likud), one of the initiators of the Nationality Law, said, "As I said this week in the Knesset: When Ahmed Tibi and Hanin Zoabi object to the Nationality Law, together with these demonstrators with Palestinian flags, I understand why they are doing it. They truly are opposed to Zionism and to the fact that Israel is the state of the Jewish people and was established as such by the United Nations. But Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni? Why are they opposed?"

Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan (Jewish Home) tweeted, "The Israeli left at the demonstration in Rabin Square tonight proves only one thing - everything is proper in their eyes in an attempt to topple the government – even to join hands with radical Arab nationalism that waves Palestinian flags, refers to IDF soldiers as murderers and describes the State of Israel as an apartheid state."

Culture and Sport Minister Miri Regev (Likud) commented on the leftist demonstration and said, "I had no doubt that Palestinian flags will be part of the backdrop at the leftist demonstration in Rabin Square this evening. The left and the Israeli Arabs prefer the colors of red, black and green over the blue and white. This is the difference between a state of all its citizens and the nation-state of the Jewish people. This is another reason for the importance of the Nationality Law.”

Regev continued, “This demonstration proves that there is cooperation between the left and the Arabs who want a different state and a different government. It will not help them and they should internalize this: Hebrew is the official language of the State of Israel. The blue and white flag with the Star of David is the official flag. Our anthem is ‘Hatikvah’ and our united capital is Jerusalem, the eternal city.”

Science Minister Ofir Akunis (Likud) said, "If anyone still had any doubt why the Nationality Law is necessary, then the pictures from Tel Aviv tonight are the clear and unequivocal proof that Israel needs the Nationality Law.”

MK Oded Forer (Yisrael Beytenu) said, "Ahmed Tibi is receiving a tailwind from the left and while the State of Israel is paying him wages, he is working to negate its existence, with a PLO flag flying behind him. Whoever raises this flag supports the struggle against Israel and whoever supports the struggle against Israel cannot be an MK. So, Ahmed, go fly the flag in Gaza and renounce your citizenship here. I'm sure you'll enjoy it there."

MK Oren Hazan, a member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said, "For those who are looking for an answer to why the Nationality Law is more important than ever, it is enough to take a quick look at the square that is full of hatred to get the answer. They over there in the square are not one of us and want to take away what belongs to us. Raising the PLO flags in the square is no less than a violation of sovereignty and strong incitement against the state. I call on the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Security to order the police to take down the flags and stop the disgrace."


Hezki Baruch

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/250368

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Europe: Prayer in Public Spaces - Giulio Meotti

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by Giulio Meotti

That 140,000 Muslims recently gathered in England for a public prayer event organized by a mosque known for its extremism and links to jihadi terrorists, should not only alarm the British authorities, but those in other European countries as well.

• These Arab countries know better than Europe that to contain Islamic fundamentalism, it is crucial to control the street.
• That 140,000 Muslims recently gathered in England for a public prayer event organized by a mosque known for its extremism and links to jihadi terrorists, should not only alarm the British authorities, but those in other European countries as well.

A few months ago, a global media tempest erupted after Polish Catholics held a mass public prayer event across the country. The BBC deemed it "controversial", due to "concerns it could be seen as endorsing the state's refusal to let in Muslim migrants".

The same controversy, however, did not erupt in Britain when 140,000 Muslims prayed in Birmingham's Small Heath Park, in an event organized by the Green Lane Mosque to mark the end of Ramadan.

France is debating whether or not to block prayer on the street. "They will not have prayers on the street, we will prevent street praying" Interior Minister Gerard Collomb announced.
"Public space cannot be taken over in this way", said the president of the Paris regional council, Valérie Pécresse, who led a protest by councilors and MPs. In Italy, hundreds of Muslims prayed next to Colosseum, and Muslim prayers were held in front of Milan's Cathedral.

The numbers are telling. When Muslims throughout Europe celebrated the final day of Islam's holy month of Ramadan with public prayers, city squares -- from Naples (Italy) to Nice (France) -- overflowed. The annual Birmingham event began in 2012 with 12,000 faithful. Two years later, the number of the faithful rose to 40,000. In 2015, it was 70,000. In 2016, the number was 90,000. In 2017, it was 100,000. In 2018, the number was 140,000. Next year?

"While the two [local] churches are nearly empty, the Brune Street Estate mosque has a different problem — overcrowding," noted The Daily Mail, exposing the situation in London.

"The mosque itself is little more than a small room rented in a community centre, and it can hold only 100. However, on Fridays, those numbers swell to three to four times the room's capacity, so the worshippers spill out onto the street, where they take up around the same amount of space as the size of the near-empty St Mary's [Church] down the road".
Public prayer is not a "normal" manifestation of the legitimate Western freedom of worship. Through these public events, some extremist Muslims seem to be presenting an alternative to Europe's secularism.

How does this compare to the Middle East and North Africa? In Tunisia, praying in the street has been banned. And in Egypt, preaching from 20,000 "storefront mosques" was banned throughout Ramadan. "Salafis and Muslim Brotherhood members took control of many of these mosques and have continued to use them as platforms to broadcast their religious misconceptions," Jaber Taya, spokesman of Egypt's Ministry of Religious Endowments, said. These Arab countries know better than Europe that to contain extremism, it is crucial to control the street.

In Birmingham, one of England's most Islamized cities, the annual mass public prayer has taken place under the leadership of the Green Lane Mosque, headquarters of the radical Markali Jamat Ahi Hadith organization, which is affiliated with the supposedly "moderate" Muslim Council of Britain. Not only does the Green Lane Mosque forbid women to wear trousers or use Facebook; its speakers preach hatred for non-Muslims. Abu Usamah, one of the primary imams at the mosque, was recorded saying, "Osama Bin Laden, he's better than a thousand Tony Blairs, because he's a Muslim"; "Allah has created the woman, even if she gets a PhD, deficient. Her intellect is incomplete"; and advocating that homosexuals should be "thrown off" mountains.

An report in the French newspaper Le Figaro concluded:

"Birmingham is England's second-largest city after London. It has nearly a million inhabitants, half of whom are immigrants, with a quarter Muslims. In the very popular Small Heath neighborhood, located east of the city center, nearly 95 percent of the population is Muslim.
"The many mosques here offer a very wide range of practices ranging from Sufism to the most radical Salafism, such as the Salafi Mosque... Some shops display different closing times corresponding to those of daily prayers...
"The bookstores are religious. Travel agencies guarantee 'Muslim-friendly' holidays with destinations where clients – especially female clients -- have access to hotels with gender-segregated areas and swimming pools where women can bathe while 'preserving their modesty'".

It may not be a coincidence that many British jihadists have come from Birmingham, which has been called "the jihadist capital of Britain". The French magazine L'Obspublished an investigative report about French Islamists moving to Birmingham to enjoy a freer and more multicultural environment.

That 140,000 Muslims recently gathered in England for a public prayer event organized by a mosque known for its extremism and links to jihadi terrorists, should not only alarm the British authorities, but those in other European countries as well.

It may not be a coincidence that many British jihadists have come from Birmingham, which has been called "the jihadist capital of Britain." Pictured: Birmingham Central Mosque, in Birmingham, England. (Image source: Oosoom/Wikimedia Commons)

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12568/europe-public-prayer

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Wind and Solar Energy: Good for Nothing - Norman Rogers

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by Norman Rogers

The bottom line is that wind and solar are useless. Here is why.

The defenders of wind and solar claim that subsidies are a minor help to get a new industry going.  These defenders counter critics with the fallacious claim that fossil fuels receive huge subsidies.  Actually, the fossil fuel industry pays huge taxes.

Focusing on explicit subsidies is the wrong approach for understanding the subsidies provided to wind and solar.  The explicit subsidies include such things as a 30% construction subsidy for solar and a 2.3-cent-per-kilowatt-hour subsidy for wind.  Both technologies benefit from tax equity financing, a scheme based on special tax breaks and gaming the corporate income tax of a highly taxed corporate partner.

A better way to measure the wind and solar subsidies is to look at the benefits and losses to the economy.  A net loss to the economy implies a subsidy.  Once it is recognized that a subsidy is present, the next step is to figure out who is paying for it.  Invariably, it is either the taxpayer or the consumer of electricity.

For example, if it costs $5 a bushel to produce soybeans, and they are sold in the soybean market for $4 a bushel, there is a net loss to the economy.  Someone has to pay for the loss.  That someone could be the farmers, soybean speculators, or taxpayers if the government subsidizes the loss.  Selling soybeans for $4 that cost $5 makes the economy poorer.

Without subsidies, and in locations with good wind or sunshine, the cost of producing wind or solar electricity is about seven cents per kilowatt-hour.  By coincidence, the cost is almost equal for the two technologies.  These technologies don't require fuel.  Most of the cost is the amortization of the capital investment.  If an installation has a useful life of 20 years, the annual, amortized cost of the electricity produced is essentially the annual payment on a 20-year mortgage to finance the project.  Seven cents per kilowatt-hour is competitive with coal or nuclear and more expensive than natural gas.  But, unlike conventional generating plants, wind or solar produces erratic electricity, that comes and goes, depending on wind and sunshine.

Wind or solar plants cannot displace conventional plants because the conventional plants have to stay in place as backup plants to supply electricity when the erratic wind or solar is not producing electricity.  Although it is often claimed that wind or solar is replacing conventional generation, it only reduces the operating duty cycle of the conventional plants.  The backup plants are usually natural gas plants, because natural gas plants are agile and able to follow the rapid ups and downs of wind or solar better than other types.

The economic benefit of wind or solar is fuel savings in the backup plants when backup plant electricity is displaced by wind or solar electricity.  The cost of fuel for a natural gas plant is about two cents per kilowatt-hour.  The difference, the seven-cent cost of generating wind or solar electricity, less the two-cent benefit for fuel saved, is a five-cent-per-kilowatt-hour subsidy for wind or solar.

Some real-world examples will further illustrate the point.  Texas has a huge wind generation system with a capacity of 17,000 megawatts.  On August 31, 2016 at noon, output from the wind system fell below 1% of capacity.  The Texas wind system frequently has swings of thousands of megawatts within a few hours.  It often produces at less than 5% of capacity.

On September 1, 2017, between 4 P.M. and 6 P.M., California experienced a record demand of a bit more than 50,000 megawatts.  By 6 P.M., two thirds of solar generation was lost.  By 8 P.M., all solar generation was lost, but demand was still 46,000 megawatts.

On August 2, 2017, the normally reliable California summer sunshine was interrupted by tropical monsoon weather in Southern California.  Solar generation declined by half, and fossil fuel generation had to be mobilized to replace the lost solar.

Wind or solar is an appendage to the electrical grid rather than an essential part of the system.  If all the wind or solar vanished, the grid would continue operation without the slightest problem, because the grid has to be able handle the load without wind or solar.  Thus, wind or solar does not reduce capital investment for traditional generating plants.  You may read in the press that coal plants have been replaced by wind or solar.  That is never true.

Who bears the cost of the five-cent-per-kilowatt-hour subsidy for wind or solar?  About three cents is probably accounted for by the explicit government subsidies; the other two cents is paid for by the consumers of electricity.  The electricity that costs seven cents to produce has a five-cent subsidy, so approximately 70 percent of the cost is subsidized: 5 cents out of 7 cents.

For residential rooftop solar, the numbers are even more gruesome.  Rooftop solar electricity, exclusive of subsidies, costs not seven cents per kilowatt-hour, but about 30 cents.  These are small custom installations, and the capital cost is very high.  But the benefit is still two cents per kilowatt-hour.  The subsidy of 28 cents per kilowatt-hour is close to a 95-percent subsidy.  This does not mean that the homeowner is providing the subsidy.  Various explicit subsidies and the reality of tiered electric rates over 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, in places like California, can make it profitable for the homeowner to install a rooftop system.  Everyone else pays for the homeowner's special deal.

For solar or wind to be economically viable, either the cost per kilowatt-hour would have to be less than two cents or the cost of fuel in the backup plants would have to rise to seven cents per kilowatt-hour.  Solar and wind are mature technologies with only modest prospects, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, for lower costs in the future.  Nor is it likely that the cost of natural gas is going to triple.

Believers in catastrophic global warming may justify the massive subsidies for wind and solar on the grounds that they displace emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel.  The trouble with this idea is that wind and solar are expensive methods of reducing CO2 emissions.  If you apply the five-cent-per-kilowatt hour subsidy toward reducing CO2 emissions, it turns out that the price paid to reduce a metric ton of CO2 emissions from a backup natural gas plant is about $140.  You can buy a carbon offset from many suppliers that reduces CO2 emissions by a metric ton for about $10.  The only practical method of greatly reducing CO2 emissions from electricity production is replacing fossil fuel with nuclear.  Prominent believers in a future global warming catastrophe are supporting nuclear electricity, including James Hansen, Michael Shellenberger, and Stewart Brand.

The bottom line is that wind and solar are useless – a complete waste of money.

Norman Rogers has written the book Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy.  He has websites: DumbEnergy.com and ClimateViews.com.

Norman Rogers

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/wind_and_solar_energy_good_for_nothing.html

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The Problem with Gay Marriage - David Solway

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by David Solway

When the institution of marriage is compromised, the underpinnings of Western society will inevitably collapse.

Lately I've been thinking of a former close friend and colleague who happens to be one of the most brilliant and insightful political writers of our time.  I had referenced his work in my own books long before I got to know him and was honored to find after we'd met that the esteem was mutual.  I regarded his camaraderie as one of the blessings that conservative affiliations can afford, especially to those toiling in the scribbling trade.

Our relationship lasted many years.  We met often when he visited our shores, enjoyed many pleasant, conversation-rich dinners, shared the same circle of friends, continued to read one another's works with admiration, exchanged emails several times a week, and even wrote for the same magazines.  I introduced him to my wife, with whom he developed a friendship and appreciation for her own contributions to the conservative movement.  We were like an extended family.  What could possibly go wrong?

The short answer is, a lot.  Our relationship foundered over the vexed issue of redefining marriage, for my friend was gay and expected us to affirm the legalization of gay marriage in the United States and his forthcoming betrothal, as he referred to it, to his longtime partner.  This we could not do.  He objected to a rather obscure Facebook comment in which my wife deplored how the gay lobby's justifiable plea for tolerance, with which she was fully on board, had morphed into the triumphalist demand for the unconditional celebration of all things gay, from gay politicking to Gay Pride to so-called gay marriage.

The question of religious freedom and belief, sanctioned by the Constitution, also entered into the equation.  She supported the right of a Christian baker to refuse preparing a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.  This my friend could not accept.  An email arrived accusing us of homophobia and informing us that the friendship was over.

Although I regard the reduction of identity to one's sexual preferences, whatever these might be, as a diminishment of the complex spectrum of human personality, I have nothing against the practice of homosexuality – to each his own – and considered it a non-issue and none of my business.  I do not like to interfere in other people's personal lives.  Then and now, however, I believed as a matter of principle that redefining marriage was another kettle entirely.  People can manage their private passions as they wish, provided they remain within the common law, but marriage has to be defended not only as a binding compact between two people and an expression of religious faith, but as a social institution whose role is twofold: the preservation of cultural life and the procreation of the species.

For these reasons, marriage can be only a contract between a man and woman.  Love, companionship, spiritual and intellectual reciprocity are desirable goods, but from the institutional perspective, such golden qualities are sufficient though not necessary conditions.  As the backbone of the social covenant and the sine qua non of reproductive duration, marriage is more than merely a ritual performance or a consumer accessory.  Romance and compatibility will sweeten and strengthen commitment and avowal, but the essential point is that the contractual heterosexual union is the driving force of human culture and the warranty of human survival.

When the institution of marriage is compromised; when single mothers proliferate and are even applauded; when children are separated or alienated from their parents; when the bonds of heterosexual intimacy are breached; when gender politics sabotages concord between the sexes; when same-sex couples receive the same rights, privileges, and rewards as child-bearing couples; and when matrimony becomes the prerogative of any group whatsoever with no relation to fecundity or cultural stability, the underpinnings of Western society will inevitably collapse.

This is why Marxism, for example, considers marriage an institution that needs to be destroyed, since procreant marriage with all its attendant responsibilities is the foundation of bourgeois society.  This is why its dissolution or misprision is a prerequisite for the revolutionary socialist state in which the pivotal loyalty of the individual belongs to the sovereign collective, not to the family.  And this is why calling two men or two women in a union "marriage" has been serially championed by the left.

Marriage in its orthodox acceptation may be in some respects a flawed institution; nevertheless, it is imperative.  It is, as I've argued, the basis of civilizational survival, just as the heterosexual union in whatever form it may assume guarantees the survival of the race.  Gay "marriage," taken to its reductio ad absurdum, would terminate in the disappearance of the human race from the face of the Earth.  In weakening the institution of marriage, gay people calling themselves spouses actually endorse the logic of species annihilation.

Moreover, to contend, as same-sex couples do, that they can adopt children or rely on sperm donors merely accentuates the paradox, for they reveal themselves as dependent on precisely the sexual fertility which they forsake and the procreative function they have renounced.  There would be no gays in the absence of the bonded heterosexual couple that rears children and is socially constrained to provide for their future.  There is a debt to be paid in the only way possible: do not insult or damage the institution that gave you existence and continues to sustain it.  The fact often adduced by skeptics that not all heterosexual unions are fertile or permanent is beside the point; the ancestral purpose of marriage as an institution remains intact.

There is another paradox regarding gays who, like my former friend, are politically conservative, since they have participated in the socialist and communist paradigm of family abolition and the destruction of the very society they have taken for granted, espousing as they do a kind of archetypal sterility.  They are doing the left's bidding – professed conservatives eroding the traditional foundation of heteronormative society, turning marriage into a mockery of its reason for being.  The cognitive dissonance is startling.

None of these considerations carried any weight with my literary colleague, who accused my wife and me of rejecting his "essential humanity" and broke off all communication, saying the issue was "non-negotiable" and all discussion would henceforth cease.  We have never heard from him again.  That his sexual proclivities were wholly inconsequential to us and that we explicitly wished the best for him and his partner were now immaterial.  That he was helping to consummate the cultural mission of the left simply did not factor.

I think of our lost friendship with regret.  We still follow his political writing devoutly, though we miss the conversations and lament the forfeiture of mutual affection.  But there's no help for it.  My brief, as I've stressed, was never against him or the nature of his desire and love.  My argument was, one might say, clinical.  The received institution of marriage, whether regarded as sacrosanct or purely functional, was indispensable to both culture and race and should not be enfeebled or caricatured or rendered moot.  It has to be respected and maintained in order to serve its original purpose.

My friend would have none of it.  He demanded total assent and expected our congratulations.  But as he once wrote me about another matter, "you don't owe a friend a lie."  It's a maxim worth living by.

David Solway

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/the_problem_with_gay_marriage.html

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The Pitiful Roots of Anti-Americanism - Robert Curry

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by Robert Curry

Why Europeans, South Americans, and even U.S. Progressives hate the United States of America.

The anti-Semite is a crank and a bore.  However, the anti-Semite has an important psychological and even spiritual advantage over certain other kinds of cranks: he knows that to other people, he is a crackpot.  This leaves the door slightly ajar for him to discover that he is one.

Anti-Americanism is anti-Semitism's first cousin, but with an important difference.  A person afflicted with this terrible condition is also a crank and a bore, but because anti-Americanism is so widespread both in America and abroad, it is all too easy for the sufferers never to realize they are cranks.

After all, anti-Americanism is the norm among the globalist elites.  In his book Anti-Americanism, Jean-François Revel writes that he had "formed [his] opinion about the United States through the filter of the European press, which means my judgment was unfavorable."   But Revel wants us to understand that he has learned that anti-Americanism is more than simply a widespread climate of opinion.  Instead, he labels it a "psychopathology" and an "obsession."

For Revel, the source of this malady is obvious.  America has supplanted Europe, and the elites of Europe resent it.  Europe once dominated the world.  It no longer does, and the European elites blame America instead of themselves. 

Revel believes that the Europeans:

... should force themselves to examine how they have contributed to that [America's] preponderance.  It was they, after all, who made the twentieth century the darkest in history; it was they who brought about the two unprecedented cataclysms of the World Wars; and it was they who invented and put into place the two most criminal regimes ever inflicted on the human race – pinnacles of evil and imbecility achieved in a space of less than thirty years.

Revel is saying that obsessing over what's wrong with America helps Europeans ward off such thoughts.  Warding off unwelcome thoughts is, after all, the psychological mechanism of blame.  The greater the need for denial, the greater the intensity of the obsession. 

Anti-Americanism has the same psychological dynamic as anti-Semitism.  When the anti-Semite launches into his harangue, we instinctively recoil.  We recognize that he is a troubled soul.  We understand that he is obsessively tracing the inner contours of a mental cage that exists beyond the reach of rationality.

The mechanism of blame also explains the endemic anti-Americanism in Latin America.  Revel turns to Carlos Rangel of Venezuela for an explanation of that variant of the malady:

For Latin Americans, it is an unbearable thought that a handful of Anglo-Saxons, arriving much later than the Spanish and in such a harsh climate that they barely survived the first few winters, would become the foremost power in the world.  It would require an inconceivable effort of collective self-analysis for Latin Americans to face up to the fundamental causes of this disparity.

Once again, at the root of the condition is "an unbearable thought" – a thought so unbearable that the necessary "self-analysis" would require "an inconceivable effort."

The insights of Revel and Rangel suggest that the Americans who suffer from anti-Americanism must also be afflicted by an unbearable thought.

What unbearable thought?  The answer is ready at hand.  The Progressive project has gone from strength to strength politically in America – and everywhere it has brought ruin in its wake.  Detroit was once an economic powerhouse, and San Francisco was once America's most beautiful city.  Decades of one-party rule according to the Progressive project have wrecked Detroit, and San Francisco is becoming something truly strange, a modern city overwhelmed by human excrement in public places.

Just as the Europeans brought ruin on Europe and the South Americans keep on failing, keep on doing what has not worked and never will, the Progressives persist despite failing again and again the simple tests of common sense. 

The Progressives' failure is not a failure to enact their agenda.  They have dominated America politically for the past century.  FDR gave us really big government, and the federal government has become a scandal of fraud, waste, and abuse – a scandal that even the Big Government Press cannot keep hidden from us.  LBJ declared War on Poverty – and that war was lost.  Instead of eliminating poverty, the War on Poverty has made poverty more pathological, creating an underclass, often now described as "permanent," living on government handouts.  Even the Progressives' anti-Americanism was given free rein with the election of Barack Obama, who shared their obsession with "fundamentally transforming" America.  Yet wave after wave of electoral victory has not made American Progressives happy.

Whenever the voters put the Progressives in charge, the result is governmental metastasis and social catastrophe – by necessity.  The left is simply wrong about how things work.  It is easy to come up with programs that defy common sense.  It is also possible to use governmental power to impose those programs on society.  But the power of government can't make them work.

Instead of learning from experience, the Progressives keep ramping up their anti-Americanism in order to keep deflecting their unbearable thought that Progressivism does not work.  Today, the American left's anti-Americanism has become completely undisguised.  Leftists now want to do away with America's borders.  What would that mean?  It would mean that the American experiment in liberty had failed; it would mean the end of America. 

Destructive elements of European culture and politics brought Europe to ruin in the twentieth century, and destructive elements in South American culture and politics have kept South America down.  The ascendance of Progressivism in American culture and politics threatens to do the same to America. 

Robert Curry serves on the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute and is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea from Encounter Books.  You can preview the book here.

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/the_pitiful_roots_of_antiamericanism.html

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Hamas is taking the region to the brink of war - Yaakov Lappin

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by Yaakov Lappin

Hamas’s leadership is dangling the option of a long-term truce before Israel with one hand and firing barrages of rockets at southern Israel with the other, terrorizing hundreds of thousands of Israelis and risking the security of the Gazan civilians it rules over.

Hamas’s leadership is dangling the option of a long-term truce before Israel with one hand and firing barrages of rockets at southern Israel with the other, terrorizing hundreds of thousands of Israelis and risking the security of the Gazan civilians it rules over.

Why is Hamas doing this? Essentially, it’s because its leadership wants to signal to Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority that it is willing to go all the way in its quest to end Gaza’s isolation, and that if it cannot get enough money into Gaza to save its regime and military wing, it is willing to drag the area into a new war, whatever the consequences.

The latest round of fighting began when a Hamas live-fire demonstration of snipers in Gaza was seen, apparently by mistake, as an attack by the Israel Defense Forces, drawing Israeli tank fire that killed two Hamas gunmen. Hamas swore to revenge their deaths and began rocketing the Israeli south. But the tank-fire incident is more of a secondary catalyst, which acted as a spark in a powder keg.

The site where a mortar shell from Gaza hit an apartment building and cars in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, near the border with Gaza, on Aug. 9, 2018. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90.

Hamas is gambling on the assumption that Israel, preoccupied with greater threats to the north in the form of Hezbollah and Iranian forces in Lebanon and Syria, will make due with responding with limited airstrikes and seize on the opportunity to de-escalate in Gaza.

Hamas is also using this latest escalation to broadcast a dangerous message to the rest of the region: that it is able to control the rules of the “game,” and that it can exchange blows with Israel—the strongest regional power around—flood the Israeli south with rockets and walk away to tell the tale.

This, Hamas likely believes, will strengthen its narrative and credibility on the Palestinian street. Hamas is also using these events to push other actors into answering its demands to end Gaza’s isolation and get money pouring into Gaza again, thereby preventing an economic collapse.

But Hamas’s brinkmanship can fail for many reasons and blow up in its face. It might push too far, and compel Israel to seize the initiative and launch a major military operation that will end when Jerusalem, not Hamas, decides. Whether or not this happens will be up to the Israeli cabinet and its various, complex calculations over such a maneuver.

In addition, Hamas may fail to secure funds for Gaza because it is unable to reach an agreement with its internal enemy, the Palestinian Authority, which in many ways holds the keys to Gaza’s economy.

As long as the P.A. views Gaza as a renegade rebel Islamist province, which is under an illegitimate government that rose to power in a coup in 2007, it will block efforts by the international community or regional actors to invest in Gaza’s economy. The P.A. can get in the way of Egyptian efforts to reach a long-term arrangement to stabilize the situation.

The P.A. is demanding that Hamas disband its military wing first—something Hamas will never accept, meaning that the situation is stuck in a stalemate.

Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, which has evolved into a terrorist army specializing in urban warfare and rocket attacks, is its top priority. Hamas would rather go to war than contemplate the option of disarming. This is one of the signals it appears to be sending through recent incidents. It wants to continue investing huge sums in the military wing, and have others foot the bill for Gaza’s civilian needs.

Hamas is trying to blackmail Israel and others into accepting this setup.

Israel, for its part, will soon have to make critical decisions.

Its leaders will either need to decide that the status quo has become intolerable, and that a strategy is needed—based on a combination of military force and diplomacy—to restore calm and restore Israeli deterrence, which has been badly eroded. Alternatively, it may decide to go for a long-term truce.

Hamas’s aggression is a signal that the middle-ground option of a limited truce that is violated with increasing frequency and severity is becoming untenable.

The security escalation in southern Israel and the Gaza Strip over the last 24 hours shows that Hamas is prepared to take the region to the brink of war, and that it believes it can force new rules of conduct on Israel while paying a minimal price for its aggression.

Its actions have placed the region in danger of a major new conflict.

Yaakov Lappin

Source: https://www.jns.org/hamas-is-taking-the-region-to-the-brink-of-war/

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State Department: Israel has a right to defend itself - Elad Benari

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by Elad Benari

State Department spokeswoman says U.S. concerned by situation in Gaza but says Israel has the right to defend itself from rocket attacks.

The State Department said on Thursday that the United States is watching developments in Gaza closely and believes the situation is very concerning but Israel has a right to defend itself.

“We’ve been watching this as it has been unfolding, and it’s a very concerning situation that has taken place in Gaza,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said at a press briefing.

“Overall, we condemn the launching of missile attacks into Israel and call for an end to the destructive violence. We’ve seen reports that 180 or so rocket attacks have taken place, shot from Gaza into Israel, and we fully support Israel’s right to defend itself and to take actions to prevent provocations of that nature,” she stressed.

Pressed by a reporter who insisted that the current escalation was not started by Hamas, Nauert replied, “I’m not going to get into how this thing started. Let’s not forget that Hamas bears ultimate responsibility for the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. It’s a tremendous concern of ours.”

According to IDF data, more than 180 rocket and mortar launches from Gaza into Israeli territory have been identified since Wednesday night.

On Thursday evening, Israeli fighter jets leveled a five-story building in the Rimal neighborhood in northern Gaza.

The IDF said that the building serves as the command center for Hamas' internal security forces, which is responsible for and manages all internal security activities in the Gaza Strip. Some members of the internal security unit are also active in the military wing of Hamas and take part in armed activity against Israel.

Early Thursday morning, IDF fighter jets targeted over 20 terror sites in military compounds and in a Hamas training camp.

Among the sites targeted were a weapons manufacturing and storage facility, a complex used for the Hamas' naval force, and a military compound used for rocket launching experiments.

On Wednesday, Nickolay Mladenov, the UN envoy to the Middle East, expressed concernover the latest escalation in Gaza and particularly by the multiple rockets fired towards Israel.

Jason D. Greenblatt, the U.S. Special Representative for International Negotiations, criticized Hamas in the wake of the latest escalation in Gaza.

"Hamas regime again is launching rockets at Israeli communities. Another night of terror and families huddling in fear as Israel defends itself. This is the Hamas regime’s choice. Hamas is subjecting people to the terrifying conditions of war again," he tweeted.

Jason D. Greenblatt

✔@jdgreenblatt45

Hamas regime again is launching rockets at Israeli communities. Another night of terror & families huddling in fear as Israel defends itself. This is the Hamas regime’s choice. Hamas is subjecting people to the terrifying conditions of war again.

3:52 - 9 באוג׳ 2018

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מידע ופרטיות בנוגע למודעות טוויטר

Elad Benari

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/250321

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NAACP's own poll reveals surge in black support for Trump – and they react badly - Thomas Lifson

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by Thomas Lifson

Panic?

Dependence on 90% voting support from African-Americans for electoral success is the jugular vein of the Democratic Party.  President Trump's rising support among black voters is correctly seen as an existential threat to the party's – and progressivism's – ability to win national elections.  That's why I thought it was big news last Saturday when Rasmussen proclaimed that black approval of Trump had hit 29%, even though most of the media ignored it for reasons AT readers well understand.

But the surge in black support for President Trump is real – so real that even the far-left NAACP discovered it in a poll, though that poll (perhaps with a differently worded question) put the support at 21%.  Here is a graphic presentation of the result, showing the support for Trump among various ethnicities:

What's a race victimology group to do with this?  Of course, double down on charges that Trump is a racist.  Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner:

The NAACP said in its poll analysis, "Voters across all racial and ethnic groups believe Trump is setting race relations back.  Three quarters of African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans believe Trump is setting race relations back while a small majority of white voters believe so.  Black women (89 percent), in particular, feel disrespected by President Trump."

If calling Trump a racist hasn't stemmed the flow of black support his way, there is no reason to believe that shouting it more will start working.  It's almost as if the groups that purport to represent the interests of African-Americans are really more worried about their own careers.

Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit

Thomas Lifson

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/naacps_own_poll_reveals_surge_in_black_support_for_trump__and_they_react_badly.html

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