Trump should crack down on UNRWA, finally end fiction of Palestinian ‘refugees’

As the UN General Assembly voted to reject America’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, US Ambassador Nikki Haley issued a stern warning: We’ll remember this the next time you come calling for more hard-earned American taxpayer dollars. Most nation-states called her bluff, leaving many to wonder what comes next.

If President Trump wants to use his financial leverage at the United Nations to strike at the heart of the anti-America, anti-Israel institutional infrastructure, he should look no further than the agency responsible for Palestinian refugees: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

By most definitions, refugees are those forced to flee their country because of persecution, war or violence. Nearly every refugee in the world is cared for by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, whose ultimate goal is repatriation, resettlement and integration. The exception? Palestinian refugees.

Arab states insisted on a different definition for Palestinian-Arab refugees of the Israeli War of Independence — and a different agency to care for them. Today, millions of people are referred to as “Palestinian refugees” even though the only home they, and in many cases even their parents and grandparents, have ever known is either a refugee camp or an Arab host nation like Jordan.

Rather than use the billions of dollars of international assistance provided since 1950 to resettle and integrate Palestinian-Arab refugees — just as Israel successfully resettled and integrated Jewish refugees from the Middle East, North Africa and the Soviet Union — UNRWA’s mandate has always been to keep Palestinians as perpetual refugees...

The rise of the terror amnesia industry

2017 might prove to be the year we caved in to terrorism. The year we accepted that the occasional act of Islamist barbarism, the occasional mass stabbing of Saturday-night revellers or blowing apart of girls at an Ariana Grande concert, is just something that happens, like bad weather. It was the year in which our response to terror was not anger, far less ‘Blitz Spirit’, but a collective sad-face emoji. ‘Don’t look back in anger’, we said after the horror in Manchester, perfectly capturing the defeatist, self-silencing, emotion-policing nature of our attitude to terror today.

In 2017 we witnessed the rise of the terror amnesia industry – an informal but effective effort by the political class and opinion-forming set to shush serious discussion about terrorism; to tame strong emotions post-terror; to make people forget, in essence, the latest bloody destruction of their fellow citizens, or at least stop thinking about it. ‘Don’t look back…’

This Orwellian encouragement of forgetting, this cultivation of emotional passivity in response to radical Islam, this top-down demonisation of concern about Islamist terror as a species of ‘Islamophobia’, is the reason why even something as horrific as the Manchester attack, the targeting of our next generation, of girls, does not live in the collective memory in the way it ought to. The speed with which the Manchester horror evaporated from the national consciousness was one of the most disturbing political events in Britain in 2017...

The Death Rattle of Obama’s Reputation

The members of Barack Obama’s administration in exile have become conspicuously noisy of late—even more so than usual. Former CIA Director John Brennan accused Donald Trump and his administration of engaging in “outrageous,” “narcissistic” behavior typical of “vengeful autocrats” by threatening proportionate retaliation against countries that voted to condemn the United States in the United Nations, as though that were unprecedented. It is not. James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, all but alleged that the president is a Russian “asset.” Perhaps the most acerbic and incendiary series of accusations from the former Democratic president’s foreign-policy professionals were placed in the New York Times by Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice. In her estimation, America has abdicated its role as a “force for good.”

It’s no coincidence that these overheated condemnations accompany abundant evidence that the Trump administration is finding its legs. As the last administration’s undeserved reputation as sober-minded foreign policy rationalists is dismantled one retrospective report at a time, its jilted members are lashing out...

Rex Murphy: The real fake news of 2017

...When the majority of the American media failed in their coverage of the presidential election, they had to find some excuse for their massive incompetence. The New York Times, with all their resources, and after two full years of daily coverage of the campaign, was nonetheless projecting Hillary Clinton’s chances of victory at a full 92 per cent on election night itself. That was at least better than the pathologically anti-Trump HuffPost, which had Hillary’s chances set at a modest 98 per cent! Such was the state of American journalism, these companies barely allowed for the mere possibility that Trump could win. Under their professional eye, he was just a sideshow, even in the very hours before he actually won.


These two—the Times and HuffPost—can stand for a large set of the American press, both traditional and online. Their reading of the American election was the greatest journalistic failure—the largest act of group incompetence—in decades. This failure fostered the need for some excuse for how they got so much so wrong.    

They couldn’t just step out honestly and say: “Hey, we despised this guy so much that it really warped our thinking and twisted our coverage, blocked out what we didn’t want to see. We were so mad at him we could not see.” That would have been the truthful and honourable thing to do. So, obviously, it was not adopted. Instead, the answer they did come up with, quickly and conveniently enough, was Fake News...

Republicans seek answers on Obama actions around Hezbollah

Congressional Republicans on Thursday demanded action and sought more information following a POLITICO report that the Obama administration derailed a law enforcement campaign against drug trafficking by the terrorist group Hezbollah as former President Barack Obama sought to secure a nuclear agreement with Iran.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) urged President Donald Trump to reinstate a task force to combat illegal activities by Hezbollah in the U.S., and he called on the Justice and Treasury departments to investigate the matter.

Reps. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), both members of the House oversight committee, called for the Department of Justice to hand over by Jan. 8 all documents related to interference with law enforcement efforts against Hezbollah. They also asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to brief the oversight panel's staff by Jan. 12.

The POLITICO investigation found that a campaign dubbed Project Cassandra was launched in 2008 to monitor Hezbollah's criminal activities after the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered evidence of drug and weapons trafficking and money laundering by the group. But participants in the task force said the Obama administration created roadblocks, saying officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed or rejected requests for approval for some investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions...

'Is That True or Not?': Tucker Presses Former Obama Official on Hezbollah-Drug Trafficking Report

The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests...

Orwellian Academic Censorship

It's not easy being a Funkhouser

Steven Pinker: Why do progressives hate progress?

The documentary about 'transgender kids' the CBC was too cowardly to broadcast

The documentary discusses the perspective that goes against politically correct orthodoxy that states that kids who are too young to cross the street by themselves and can't yet tie their shoelaces can determine their gender identity when it conflicts with their sex.

There may be extreme cases where it is merited, but in most cases, pre-pubescent medical intervention in these cases is a result of the politicization of medicine, and is a type of child abuse.

CBC was going to broadcast it, then chickened out.

The Vast Failure of the United Nations - an IdeaCity Panel with Aurel Braun, Geoffrey Clarfield, John Robson, & Rev. Majed El Shafie

This panel critical of the UN was based on an idea I proposed to Moses Znaimer.

After it was over, someone I know stormed out, muttering about it being a talk by "right-wing fascists."

Which is ironic, since the promotion of genuine democracies and decrying the usurpation of the UN by dictatorships was the whole point of the discussion.

Trump's bizarre superpower: he causes his enemies to destroy themselves

From the great Andrew Klaven:

Palestinians say Trump told Abbas he intends to move US embassy to Jerusalem

This was BEFORE Trump phoned Abbas. https://t.co/CBQQ54wwoe

— Khaled Abu Toameh (@KhaledAbuToameh) December 5, 2017

(CNN) President Donald Trump outlined his intentions to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in a call with President Mahmoud Abbas Tuesday according to Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh.

The Palestinians said that Abbas warned Trump in the call against the dangers of such a step and added that he would continue reaching out to world leaders to prevent it from happening. Neither the White House nor the Palestinians offered details on the timing of an embassy move, which previous administrations have delayed indefinitely.

Despite strong pushback from US allies and concerns about the safety of US military and diplomatic personnel in the region, Trump is insisting that he fulfill campaign promises about Jerusalem...

The Making Of THE PARTY

Jordan Peterson - Political Correctness and Postmodernism

Jordan Peterson at IdeaCity:

The politicization of Psychiatry at the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health jeopardizes patient health

An extensively researched and  detailed account of how Trans identity politics is placing people at real risk at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Heath by Jesse Singal:

On paper, Dr. Kenneth Zucker isn’t the sort of person who gets suddenly and unceremoniously fired. For decades, the 65-year-old psychologist had led the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic (GIC), in Toronto, one of the most well-known clinics in the world for children and adolescents with gender dysphoria — that is, the feeling that the body they were born with doesn’t fit their true gender identity. Zucker had built up quite a CV during his time leading the clinic: In addition to being one of the most frequently cited names in the research literature on gender dysphoria and gender-identity development, and the editor of the prestigious journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, he took a leading role helping devise diagnostic and treatment guidelines for gender dysphoric and transgender individuals. He headed the group which developed the DSM-5’s criteria for its “gender dysphoria” entry, for example, and also helped write the most recent “standards of care” guidelines for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health  —  one of the bibles for clinicians who treat transgender and gender-dysphoric patients.

An impressive career, yes, but it’s doubtful any of this gave him much comfort on December 15. That was when he was called in from vacation for an 8:30 a.m. meeting with his employer, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), one of the largest mental health and addiction research hospitals in Canada. Given the long-brewing investigation of his clinic by the hospital, it’s unlikely Zucker was feeling optimistic about what awaited him in downtown Toronto.

The GIC, which operates out of CAMH, pronounced “Cam-H,” had been standing firm against a changing tide in the world of psychological treatment for children with gender dysphoria. The “gender-affirmative” approach, which focuses on identifying young transgender children and helping them socially transition — that is, express their gender to others through their everyday clothes, name changes, or other means — has been on the rise in recent years, and has become the favored protocol of many activists and clinicians. GIC clinicians, who saw clients between ages 3 and 18, had a much more cautious stance on social transitioning for their younger clients — they believed that in many cases, it was preferable to first “help children feel comfortable in their own bodies,” as they often put it, since in the GIC’s view gender is quite malleable at a young age and gender dysphoria will likely resolve itself with time.

Many activists see this approach as a rejection of young children’s transgender identities, and Zucker as its regressive standard-bearer. As a result, the GIC had been tarred for years as a “conversion” or “reparative” therapy clinic — terms which conjure images of outfits operated out of backwoods shacks in the Bible Belt. Responding to what felt like a surge in this line of criticism from activists, CAMH had agreed in February of 2015 to commission an External Review that would evaluate the clinic’s operations, and possibly, Zucker and his staffers knew, determine its future. CAMH had already taken actions suggesting that that future might be dim: In June of 2014, the hospital closed the GIC’s approximately 80-family waitlist (for being too long, administrators said), and about two months before Zucker’s vacation was interrupted, the clinic’s only other full-time staffer, the psychologist Dr. Hayley Wood, was laid off on her first day back from maternity leave. (Wood declined to comment for this article.)

And now, the meeting: According to a source close to Zucker, he was met at CAMH by Christina Bartha, executive director of the hospital’s Underserved Populations Program. She gave the psychologist a three-ring binder: the long-awaited External Review. Bartha instructed Zucker to read it in her presence, and to offer up any comments he had about it. Not far into the report, Zucker told Bartha that he had noticed a factual error. Bartha responded that the review would be posted on the hospital’s website that afternoon, as-is — no changes. Zucker continued reading and saw that the reviewers had interviewed a handful of activists and clinicians who had claimed that the GIC was engaging in conversion therapy; that photos were taken of patients without their consent and then disseminated; and that former clients said they felt traumatized and ashamed as a result of their time there. Then, Zucker got to a truly bizarre allegation: A former patient, at the time an adolescent transitioning from female to male who was seeking a sex-reassignment surgery referral, said that Zucker had asked him to take his shirt off, laughed when he had done so, and then told him, “You’re a hairy little vermin!” The incident had never happened. Zucker looked at Bartha and, in disbelief, said something like, “So, you are going to post this on the website?” Yes, Bartha responded. Meaning that in a few hours, Zucker’s many detractors would read about how he had cruelly mocked the body of a young trans person.

Zucker told Bartha there was no point in continuing the exercise. Sometime around 9:00 or 9:15, Bartha left, and she was replaced by a human resources staffer who informed Zucker that he was fired, effective immediately. He was told it wouldn’t be a good idea for him to retrieve his coat and keys from his office — someone would grab them for him. Zucker was presented with materials on how to find a new job, and that was that. (Zucker’s attorney, John Adair, confirmed this account of his dismissal, while a CAMH spokeswoman and Bartha didn’t respond to a request for comment. Through Adair, Zucker otherwise declined to comment for this article.)

For transgender activists in North America and around the world, the ouster of one of their biggest enemies in the field of mainstream sex research was a spectacular victory. Sweeter still, they found out later that day that CAMH would be “winding down” the GIC entirely, with an eye toward eventually retooling and reopening it with input from its critics. Years of activism, years of hearing and telling stories about what Zucker’s clinic did to vulnerable, gender-questioning young people, had finally paid off. The activists had won what seemed like a satisfying end to a simple, sad story. “Infamous Reparative Therapy Clinic For Transgender Youth Set To Close” trumpeted ThinkProgress. “Hooray! A Big, Bad Conversion Therapy Clinic For Trans Youth In Canada Is Shutting Down,” went the MTV headline. Good prevailed over evil, in other words. Those innocent children would never suffer again.

Zucker, his colleagues, and their many allies in the world of academic sex research see things differently. To them, the real scandal here is how CAMH responded to a sustained campaign of political pressure: by allowing a vital scientific question — vital not only to gender-dysphoric and transgender young people, but to anyone who is a parent or will one day become one — to be decided by activists on the basis of flimsy, anonymous allegations. They think the activists’ claims about the clinic are unfounded, and argue that the controversy has more to do with adult agendas than with genuine concern for gender-dysphoric children and youth. As Dr. Jack Drescher, a psychiatrist with a research focus on gender-identity issues, explained in an email, this fight resembles many other culture-war battles: “[C]hildren serve as proxies for the competing value systems of adults.” Indeed, some parents of GIC patients feel that as a result of the clinic’s closing, their children have been cut off from a place that was — despite rumors to the contrary — a safe, nurturing environment for young people to explore their emerging gender identities.

The External Review, Zucker’s allies believe, was just a sloppily executed pretense for submitting to political pressure...

More at THE CUT

Trump administration fights racism against Asians in American universities

The US Justice Department finally is confronting Harvard University and other elite colleges that blatantly discriminate against Asian-American applicants with a quota system.

To get into Harvard, students of Asian heritage have to score hundreds of points higher on competitive exams than non-Asians with similar or even inferior academic records.

That’s why the Trump administration’s Justice Department is demanding Harvard’s admissions records and launching an investigation. No surprise Harvard is stonewalling. It has plenty to hide...

Iran bans women from riding bicycles in public

Victorian England was the epitome of modern feminism and
liberalism compared to 21st Century Iran

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa declaring that women are forbidden to ride bicycles in public, Iran Students News Agency (ISNA) reported on November 26.

In response to a religious inquiry, Khamenei also said it is prohibited for women to ride bicycles in the presence of strangers and those who are not their immediate family...

Some people's thoughts about censorship and harassment

Rex Murphy in National Post: 

...Forced apologies come perilously close to a contradiction in terms, the point of an apology being the willing recognition of a genuine wrong and sincere regret for having caused it. Rather than, as in Laurier’s case, a desperate hope to pacify angry donors and reel back the good will of an outraged and astonished public.

May I summarize the points so far by saying that my positionality on their apologies is problematic and my problematics on their positionality is profound.

The real mess here, however, is that they are choosing not to see the full problem at all: that their dealings with Shepherd are but a particular of a general phenomenon, a parable, if you will, of a collapse in the understanding of the university, what education is, and how it is being delivered.

Here’s what is not in the apology. That this is not some one-off incident, but rather an egregious illustration that some humanities courses at all universities (mainly with the tag “studies”) function not as educative undertakings, but as commitments to a narrow, predestined ideological viewpoint. That such studies are enclosed universes of fixed thought, or intellectual predisposition. That wedding any course to a pre-chosen political goal — social justice, identity studies, oppression studies, feminism — turns it into a sophisticated vehicle of indoctrination and propaganda. Such courses inculcate doctrines, disoblige inquiry, abhor dissent, and are the reverse of an educational exercise...

Niall Ferguson in The Sunday Times:

 yet it was not a professional feminist who exposed the allegations of rape and sexual assault against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, but the male broadcaster Ronan Farrow. And he cannot have foreseen, when he published his devastating j’accuse in The New Yorker last month, that it would unleash a cascade of accusations fatal to the reputations of such erstwhile darlings of New Yorker readers as the comedian-turned-senator Al Franken, the actor Kevin Spacey, the comedian Louis CK, the political journalist Mark Halperin and the interviewer Charlie Rose.

The New York Times — which along with The Washington Post has been working the phones to keep the cascade going — is keeping score. To date, it reckons, 34 “high-profile men have resigned, been fired or experienced other fallout after accusations that have ranged from inappropriate text messages to rape”. Embarrassingly, it emerged last week that one of them was that newspaper’s very own Glenn Thrush.

It would be interesting to know what proportion of these people waxed indignant last year about Donald Trump’s confession — in a conversation recorded on a “hot mic” during an Access Hollywood appearance in 2005 — to being a serial sexual harasser. Rather a high one, I would guess. Here was Mark Halperin’s response on Twitter: “When people say some new Trump tape could have material that is WORSE than the @accesshollywood video, what exactly could be WORSE?!?”

Al Franken also commented. “I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms,” he said in an interview on NBC. “I belong to a health club in Minneapolis . . . Our locker-room banter is stuff like, ‘Is Trump crazy?’”

Louis CK preferred to equate Trump with Hitler, the least of whose crimes was inappropriate behaviour towards women. On Stephen Colbert’s show in April, CK called Trump a “gross, crook, dirty, rotten, lying sack of shit”. Well, who’s gross now?

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Sexual harassment was supposed to be the kind of thing only Republicans did — inveterate sexists such as Trump or alleged molesters of underage schoolgirls such as Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama. How very awkward that the majority of names in the New York Times list of top harassers are men of the left, not the right...

And a ridiculously inane bit of hysteria that relies on false characterizations and frantic, stupid equivalences of intellectual critique and exploration of ideas with "violence" in order to justify suppression of free speech - this from an idiot Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wilfred Laurier University named Greg Bird

...The brand of free speech being promoted in most of the articles is hypocritical. It is actually a silencing form of speech. Other than a few champions of free speech who are using this as an opportunity to advance their neo-conservative agenda, all other voices have been silenced. Two-spirit, transgender, and non-binary people have been left out of the discussion, again. Why have student and faculty organizations, community organizations, or notable thinkers, which represent these communities not been consulted by the authors? What is the significance of the complete erasure of these voices?

The tightly controlled framing of this story has helped to reaffirm the message of peripheral and extreme alt-right scholars like Jordan Peterson and his followers: that the voices of trans people do not matter. Sit silently on the side and wait for your turn, if it is ever presented, to speak up and defend yourself. Wait for those who question your existence to present their case first. Those who deem your very existence to be illegitimate are legitimate voices. Peterson's opinions have been given a carte blanche and thus validated. Now that this stage has been set, if you do speak out, you will face the wrath of the free speech campaigners. Bravo, this has been a well-orchestrated manoeuvre — there are few grounds left for trans people to defend themselves from. Are we debating about whether or not trans people have a right to express themselves, to receive support and protection from non-trans people, to be recognized as people who not only welcome but also to live without discrimination and harassment in our society? This is not a "neutral" conversation.

What are the impacts of this media frenzy? Given the widespread and firmly entrenched transphobia in our society, including alarmingly high rates of physical and sexual assault, discrimination, harassment, intimidation, and a litany of other forms of attacks faced by members of the trans community, non-trans people should take a breath, pause, and think seriously about the broader set of problems that have not only been ignored but actually been granted a bigger platform. Many have already suffered greatly by the spotlight our media has placed on Peterson. Now that this circus show has turned up on our campus, more people are being hurt and our community has been deeply impacted.

On Tuesday, the Wilfrid Laurier University Rainbow Centre released a statement that they have received an uptake in transphobic and homophobic attacks and harassment, and they expect much more, as a direct result of the media's framing of this event. This was on full display in comments made about their statement on Facebook and Twitter. The fact that the only issue up for discussion in the media has been one of free speech, speaks loudly to how normalized transphobia is in our society. Is freedom of speech more important than the safety and well-being of members of our society? Do we want to be living in Donald Trump's America?

Universities are supposed to be spaces where students should learn, grow, and flourish. They are not supposed to be violent institutions that teach students to feel shame about who they are, to remain silent, and to repress themselves. This is a form of education that has already been employed in our country, in the residential schools. It is time for us to think seriously about how free speech is being used and abused in our institutions. Why is it being used, how is it being used, and who is using it? Is freedom of speech merely about exposing students to new ideas? This is a very shallow notion of learning, one that could be easily obtained by surfing the internet. Universities should be providing a lot more, but what exactly the more is, and how it can be realized, is an issue that we need to start thinking about.