(Can’t upset our listeners with unmonitored (unedited) conservative stuff. –DM)
`National Public Radio ombudsman/public editor Elizabeth Jensen has recommended that the taxpayer-funded radio news service bar future live interviews of conservatives who may have controversial views, following an interview Nov. 16 with Breitbart News’ Joel B. Pollak.
Pollak, who serves as Breitbart’s Senior Editor-at-Large and In-house Counsel, defended its Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon from false and defamatory claims of antisemitism and “white nationalism.” He also turned the tables, pointing out that NPR has “racist programming,” including a story that called the 2016 election results “nostalgia for a whiter America.”
NPR listeners were apparently outraged that anyone from Breitbart News had been given an opportunity to defend the website and its chairman.
She suggested that future interviews be taped: “In addition, in my opinion, these interviews should not be done live. Inskeep is an excellent live interviewer, but live interviews are difficult, especially when there is limited time. A little contextualizing never hurts.”
Jensen went on to argue that “contextualizing” had worked for a similar interview with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, as well as for an interview Nov. 17 with white nationalist Richard Spencer. (Pollak responded to the latter interview in an article Nov. 18 rejecting NPR’s attempt to link Bannon and Breitbart with white nationalism.)
Notably, Jensen’s recommendation mirrors the language of a critique by the left-wing pressure group Media Matters, which complained that “the interview failed to contextualize the true extent of Breitbart’s extremism under Bannon’s leadership.”
Bannon was recently appointed Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to President-elect Donald J. Trump. He took a leave of absence from Breitbart News in August when he was appointed Trump campaign CEO.
Jensen applauded the use of the term “white nationalist” to describe Bannon, although she noted Bannon had disputed that term. She linked to an internal NPR memorandumsuggesting the term “white nationalist” be used in stories on the “alt-right.”
“Far-right anti-Muslim groups have seized on the arson attack to call for a ban on refugees entering the country.”
Maybe they’re not “far-right” or “anti-Muslim” at all. Maybe they just don’t like things like, you know, jihad massacres and arson attacks in banks.
Their concerns, however, are misplaced — as always! “Victoria’s state Premier Daniel Andrews said on Sunday there was no political motivation involved in the attack on the bank,” and demanded that the attack not be used as “a political weapon by anybody who finds fault with any of the policy settings we have at the moment.”
How he knows there was no political motivation behind the attack, he didn’t say. But Reuters does tell us that the attacker “was suffering mental and financial problems.”
Mental problems! Of course! And what better way to deal with one’s financial problems than to set fire to a bank?
“Suspect in Australian bank fire identified as asylum seeker,” by Harry Pearl, Reuters, November 20, 2016:
A man suspected of starting a fire in an Australian bank on Friday that injured 27 people has been identified as an asylum seeker, angering far-right groups and adding to an increasingly heated national debate over immigration.
Six people were taken to hospital in critical condition after the 21-year-old suspect walked into a Melbourne branch of Commonwealth Bank of Australia and lit an accelerant, setting himself and the office on fire, Victoria Police said, adding the man was also in serious condition.
Far-right anti-Muslim groups have seized on the arson attack to call for a ban on refugees entering the country. They rallied in the city on Sunday to celebrate Republic Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential election victory….
Victoria’s state Premier Daniel Andrews said on Sunday there was no political motivation involved in the attack on the bank.
“It is not a commentary, and it oughtn’t to be used as a political weapon by anybody who finds fault with any of the policy settings we have at the moment,” The Age newspaper quoted Andrews as saying.
Habib Habib, from the Australian Burmese Rohingya Organization, said the man alleged to have carried out the attack was a Rohingya asylum seeker.
The man, who had spent time at an immigration detention on Christmas Island, was suffering mental and financial problems, he said. A federal government source confirmed to Reuters the man arrived in Australia by boat in 2013.
Hatred of Jews is deeply ingrained in the Qur’an, which calls Jews “the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers” (5:82), and says that they “have been put under humiliation wherever they are overtaken, except for a covenant from Allah and a rope from the Muslims. And they have drawn upon themselves anger from Allah and have been put under destitution. That is because they disbelieved in the verses of Allah and killed the prophets without right. That is because they disobeyed and transgressed.” (3:110)
It says that Allah transformed the disobedient Jews into apes and pigs (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166). It says that they say Ezra is Allah’s son, and are consequently accursed (9:30). And there are many other passages heaping contempt and scorn upon them. Analysts routinely think that attacks like this one happen because of the conflict between Israel and the “Palestinians,” but in reality the enmity goes much deeper than that.
“Egyptian Human Rights Activist Hany Elsadek in Defense of Hitler: A Great Man Who Exposed the Truth about the Jews,” MEMRI, October 31-November 8, 2016:
Egyptian human rights activist Hany Elsadek recently defended Hitler, saying that what he did was “no worse than what France did in Algeria.” In two video-clips that he posted on his social media accounts on October 31 and November 8, Elsadeq, who heads the “Middle East for Rights and Freedoms,” said that Hitler got his reputation in the media as an arch-killer “because he exposed the truth about the Jews.” Holding up a Arabic-language copy of “Mein Kampf,” he claimed that Hitler, “a respectable man who loved his country,” had killed only four or five thousand Jews, but that they had inflated the number to six million.
October 31, 2016
Hany Elsadek: “In the name of Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate. This is an instructive attempt to correct false notions. Why is the media hostile to someone whom they label an arch-killer – Hitler? Why Hitler, of all people? There have been many such criminals throughout history, so why was Hitler specifically labeled a killer, a murderer, a criminal, and so on?
“The problem is that Hitler was the only one who confronted two power hubs – the socialist Communists and the Jews. Hitler believed that they posed a great danger to his country, Germany. When Hitler killed or burned some 4,000-5,000 Jews, the Jews inflated the number and said that six million were burned – not 4,000 or 5,000. Secondly, Hitler attacked the greatest superpowers of that time, England and France, and started taking over their lands, posing a threat to the thrones of other countries. He became a bogeyman in their eyes.
“But what Hitler did is no worse than what France did in Algeria. It’s no worse than what Begin did to the Palestinians, or what Moshe Dayan or Napoleon did. But Hitler became a specific target because he alone exposed the truth about the Jews. He wrote in his memoirs: ‘They call themselves the Chosen People, while they spread prostitution in secret.’ This is just a short presentation about this great man, Hitler, who loved his people and his country. We should all read Hitler’s life story so that we will know the truth, and realize that the terrorism of the Jews, through their media, is distorting the image of Hitler. Thank you, and goodbye.”
[…]
November 8, 2016
Hany Elsadek: “I’d like to give you a short presentation about Hitler. How come the media is always against him, describing him as an arch-killer, a murderer, and all kinds of foul descriptions? There are a few things that we need to take into consideration. First, we need to remember that the global media, in the Arab world and in Europe, is controlled by the Jews. The sworn enemies of Hitler were the Jews. We should say this loud and clear. They were followed by Hitler’s other enemies – the Communists. He was upset by the Jews, who incited six million workers against the state. They withdrew money from German banks, a move that led to economic collapse.
“The Jews in Germany constituted some 2% of a population of 50-60 million, and they controlled the judiciary, the theater, the media, and so on. The Jews have always raised the slogan of the ‘Chosen People,’ while secretly spreading prostitution. The Jews have always spread abomination. [Hitler] was very upset that the Jews had introduced homosexuality into German theater – with men marrying mem and women marrying women. They were the ones who began producing and promoting sex films. He viewed the Jews as responsible for the moral deterioration of the German people, as well as for the economic collapse of the German state. This endangered the sovereignty of the state, just like occupation or any military attack.
“Another thig [sic] is that after confronting the Jews and the Communists, he confronted superpowers like England, France, the USSR, and the economically powerful newborn state, the USA. He attacked England, Austria, France, the USSR, and America. He alone confronted these superpowers, which enslaved the Arab nations.
“This has been just a short presentation, and I’d like to say that Hitler was a respectable man, who loved his people and his country. One last thing I want to say is that Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations, and then they pressured him [to return]. His condition was that he would get back the colonies Germany lost following WWI. He fooled them, and they gave him back all the colonies they took over following WWI, without any military confrontation. This was a short presentation about Hitler. Goodbye.”
Pantsuit Nation was supposed to carry Hillary Clinton to victory. But its cause proved as limp as its pantsuits and now it is bereft and seeking something to do. So a bunch of its members donned hijabs and went out to show their love for a rather notorious mosque.
After a presidential election that divided the country and often stoked tensions against minorities, a group of roughly 40 mostly women and children shared a different message Friday.
“We love our Muslim neighbors,” the signs read.
The visitors – members of the pro-Hillary Clinton group Pantsuit Nation – toured the Islamic Society of Greater Charlotte on The Plaza and greeted worshipers with smiles and signs of support before an afternoon service.
The goal: “To show we love them,” said Kristi Tolman, 40, who stopped by the Islamic center during her lunch hour. “They have to be scared because of all the hateful rhetoric.”
Aww. The poor dears.
But speaking of hateful rhetoric…
At the Islamic Society of Greater Charlotte, few of the several hundred Muslims gathered for Friday Prayer wanted to talk about Mr. Khan.
“This is a very dangerous road when you go and kill someone like this,” said Ayeb Suleiman, 25, a medical resident. “He was just an editor. He was just writing.”
Who was Samir Khan? He was a leading Al Qaeda figure killed in a drone strike who delivered a sermon at the Islamic Society of Greater Charlotte saying that Muslims who weren’t engaged in Jihad were cowards.
The two Hizballah brigades carry both American and Russian weaponry. DEBKAfile’s military sources report: The motorized rifle brigade is armed with American armored personnel carriers and tanks, whereas the Light Brigade carries Russian arms. Some of the units use both American and Russian hardware, like the Russian ZPU-2 anti tank guns which are mounted on US M113 APCs.
****************************
Hizballah this week transferred two brigades of some 5,000 fighters to the Aleppo front to bolster the Assad regime’s concentrated push to finally rout the rebels who have been holding out year after year in the eastern half of the ravaged city. Indiscriminate Syrian air strikes continue.
The new spearhead is made up of Hizballah’s heavy motorized rifle brigade of tanks and heavy weapons and its light commando brigade, which is trained to operate behind enemy lines. Their arrival brings the total number of Hizballah fighters in Syria to 15,000.
Russian military sources say that, after Aleppo is won for Bashar Assad, the two Lebanese Shiite brigades will turn to Idlib province in the north, to tackle the largest concentration in the country of Al Qaeda’s Syrian arm, the Nusra Front.
The two Hizballah brigades carry both American and Russian weaponry. DEBKAfile’s military sources report: The motorized rifle brigade is armed with American armored personnel carriers and tanks, whereas the Light Brigade carries Russian arms. Some of the units use both American and Russian hardware, like the Russian ZPU-2 anti tank guns which are mounted on US M113 APCs.
Sunday, Nov. 14, on the day that Hizballah started moving the two brigades to the Aleppo front, its propaganda machine released to the Arab media images of a military parade in Qusayr, in the Qalamoun mountain range of western Syria, showing Hizballah troops marching with American hardware. The parade, according to our sources, was faked, the point being to show the world that the Iranian proxy was amply supplied with American equipment.
Assad rewarded Hizballah for capturing Qusayr three years ago by allowing the Iranian proxy to turn the ghost town into a military center. Several workshops for recycling captured weapons for reuse in battle were set up there. (In the same way, the IDF recycled the masses of Russian weapons taken booty from Arab armies in the 60s and 70s.)
Another project was the creation and arming of the Light Brigade modeled on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards special operations units. They are equipped with highly adaptable “jihad-mobiles” which are designed to move in all-terrain and all-weather conditions to take the enemy by surprise from the rear. The the battle of Aleppo sees their first operation in the Syrian war.
Like Syrian special forces units, the Hizballah Light Brigade drives Russian UAZ Patriot-SUV pickup trucks on which are mounted Kord heavy machine guns and AGS-17 grenade launchers. These vehicles are equipped with automatic filters adapted for combat in arid desert conditions to overcome difficulties in vision and breathing.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Democrats, the lamebrain media (but I repeat myself), academics (Opps! I repeated myself again) and others who should know better are protesting — often violently — against Trump’s victory. Trump Derangement Syndrome is upon us.
Trump won fair and square. He did not rely on non-citizens or others who are barred from voting. As President, he intends, with the help of Congress, to make changes in U.S. policy. Horrors!
Reflections via Gilbert and Sullivan
Thank Zeus that Hillary won’t be the Monarch of the Sea President of the United States. The Monarch of the Seas, as depicted by G&S, certainly behaves and sounds like Hillary.
Here is Hillary on the day after her defeat.
Here’s how less-than-normally-judgmental Hillary supporters and Never Trumpers see Trump:
So much for Gilbert and Sullivan.
Here are Hillary’s supporters:
Here’s another meltdown. The linked article had a video, but YouTube says “This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.” I wonder why. Oh well. This is how Jonathan Turley describes it:
In an appearance on MSNBC (which seems at times to be moving through the stages of grieving of Kübler-Ross), McInstosh insisted that the problem was with sexist, self-hating women: “Internalized misogyny is a real thing and this is a thing we have to be talking about as we go through and see.” She added “We as a society react poorly to women seeking positions of power. We are uncomfortable about that and we seek to justify that uncomfortable feeling because it can’t possibly be because we don’t want to see a woman in that position of power. As we go through these numbers, as we figure out exactly what happened with turnout, it seems to be white college-educated women . . . We have work to do talking to those women about what happened this year and why we would vote against our self-interest.”
And then there are these no less delusional “feminists.”
#NotOurPresident on Twitter quickly gave way to riots in major cities. Democrats in the affected cities decided that the riots were a great idea even though it was their own police that were being attacked.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City’s radical leftist boss, claimed that “more disruption… will change the trajectory of things”. Even though the only trajectory that the protests have changed thus far is New York City traffic. “The more people fight back, the more it takes away his power,” he insisted.
Wiser heads on the left recognized that messing up Manhattan traffic wouldn’t stop Trump from taking office. Instead they decided to abolish the Electoral College. Senator Boxer will introduce a bill to that effect. Bernie Sanders mumbled that it’s time to rethink it. Michael Dukakis fired off an angry email insisting that Hillary Clinton had won and that abolishing it should be a top Democratic priority.
Since Hillary lost, the Electoral College is, according to Slate, an “Instrument of White Supremacy—and Sexism”. And probably Islamophobic and Homophobic too. Time Magazine defaulted to the default lefty attack on anything by accusing the Electoral College of being racist. But if Hillary had won, then any attack on the Electoral College would be racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic and claustrophobic.
Rank and filers weren’t interested in waiting to abolish it tomorrow. They skipped right to trying to rig it today. Over 4 million people have signed a petition titled, “Electoral College: Make Hillary Clinton President on December 19”. Because that’s just how they think elections should work.
Efforts were made to contact Electors directly urging them to hijack the election. Idaho Secretary of State Lawerence Denney said that the Electors were being harassed with “insults”, “vulgar language” and “threats”. One Elector reported that his cell, home phone, email and Facebook were targeted.
“They’re just trying to steal this thing,” he said.
The Electoral College is undemocratic. Unless you’re a Democrat asking it to undemocratically hijack the results of a state election while depriving its voters of political representation.
Some Democrats despaired of stealing the election and tried to steal the Supreme Court instead. There were revived calls for a Supreme Court recess appointment. There’s a petition, a Saturday Night Live punch line and a bizarre effort by Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley to move the nomination forward.
Merkley claimed that Trump has “no right to fill” that seat and that the Supreme Court seat was stolen. “We need to do everything we possibly can to block it,” he insisted.
What does that mean? How about a permanently deadlocked Supreme Court?
A Slate writer urged that, “the only way to answer nihilism is with nihilism of our own.”
“Obstruct the nomination and seating of any Trump nominee to fill Scalia’s seat,” she urged. “We will lose. But that’s not the point now… If Democrats can muster the energy to fight about nothing else, it should be this.”
A permanently deadlocked Supreme Court doesn’t sound like much of a plan. But Trump Derangement Syndrome means embracing nihilism. And it’s downright rational compared to the celebrity meltdowns as TMZ’s finest cope with the blow to their egos of an election that showed they didn’t matter.
Lady Gaga has been yelling at Trump on and off Twitter. Constitutional scholar George Takei demanded that Obama just appoint Garland. Honorary feminist Joss Whedon declared, “This is simple: Trump cannot CANNOT be allowed a term in office. It’s not about 2018. It’s about RIGHT NOW.”
What does that mean? It’s a tantrum. It means that baby wants his power and he wants it now.
And it only gets crazier from there.
The outer reaches of Trump Derangement Syndrome include calls to boycott three brands of toilet paper because they’re allegedly made by the Koch Brothers. Never mind that the Koch Brothers weren’t supporting Trump. Facts, like democracy, only matter when they happen to be on your side.
Then there are the ritual burnings of New Balance sneakers on YouTube and Instagram. Not to mention support for the secession of California from the United States of America.
A man has sued Donald Trump for $1 billion for having inflicted “great emotional pain, fear and anxiety on Election Day and beyond.” Students at Cornell held a “cry-in” to mourn the results of the election. The University of Kansas offered students therapy dogs. At the University of Michigan’s multi-ethnic student affairs center students took comfort in regressing to childhood with coloring books and Play-Doh.
John Hopkins recommended a healing circle. Stanford urged students to “take care of yourselves and to give support to those who need it.” Vanderbilt encouraged them “to take advantage of the outstanding mental health support the university offers.”
At the University of Maryland, an astronomy test was canceled to help students cope with “a personally threatening election result.” A Yale economics professor made his test optional because students were “in shock” over losing an election. A dozen midterms were rescheduled at Columbia.
One student complained, “Instead of studying for my exam, I was glued to the election update. It’s not fair to have a test the following day when something so monumental is taking place, especially when this event is threatening so many groups of people in our country.”
Under all the outraged rhetoric is a narcissistic sense of entitlement. Frustrate it and tantrums happen.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is the tantrum that happens when that sense of entitlement bursts. It’s not a new phenomenon. We saw it with Bush and with previous Republican presidents before him. But as the left’s power has grown, its insular ivory towers have become unable to imagine ever losing it.
Obama maintained the illusion that the opposition didn’t matter by ruling unilaterally. Then in one election the illusion collapsed. The left wasn’t really in charge. There were millions of people across the country in places they had never visited or even heard of who got to decide on all these issues.
That warm comfortable safe space of John Oliver and Samantha Bee viral videos, Buzzfeed stories and social media feeds filled with carefully curated people who agreed with them wasn’t reality. It had been an illusion all along. It was an elitist island that had little in common with that vast geography of people who get their say through the Electoral College. After two terms of getting their way on everything, they woke to a world in which they didn’t matter and which was suddenly no longer catering to their whims.
They don’t really want to abolish the Electoral College, to put Garland on the Supreme Court or to burn New Balance sneakers. What they really want is to get rid of democracy and replace it with a dictatorship. Trump Derangement Syndrome is the tantrum of tyrants.
It’s a real threat to democracy. But that’s what the left has always been.
The hysteria of Trump Derangement Syndrome is the flip side of Obama worship. Both reject democracy and embrace power. They are the illiberal attitudes of a totalitarian movement at odds with America. [Emphasis added.]
“A world is collapsing before our eyes”, tweeted the French ambassador to the United States, Gerard Araud, as it became clear that Donald Trump had won the US presidential election. Although he later apparently deleted the tweet, the sentiment expressed in his tweet encapsulates the attitude of the majority of the European political establishment.
Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster, described the reaction to Trump’s victory across Germany’s political spectrum as “shock and uncertainty.” Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen described Trump’s win as a “heavy shock.” German Justice Minister Heiko Maas tweeted: “The world won’t end, but things will get more crazy”.
Green party leader Cem Özdemir called Trump’s election a “break with the tradition that the West stands for liberal values.”
“Trump is the trailblazer of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international movement. … They want a rollback to the bad old times in which women belonged by the stove or in bed, gays in jail and unions at best at the side table. And he who doesn’t keep his mouth shut gets publicly bashed.”
In a fine touch of irony, EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, who recently referred to the Chinese as “slanty eyed,” told Deutschlandfunk radio that the U.S. election was a “warning” for Germany: “Things are getting simplified, black or white, good or bad, right or wrong. You can ask simple questions, but one should not give simple answers.”
In France, the media reaction was summed up by the left-leaning newspaper, Libération:
“Trumpocalypse… Shock… The world’s leading power is from now on in the hands of the far-right. Fifty percent of Americans voted in all conscience for a racist, lying, sexist, vulgar, hateful candidate.”
Critics omitted, however, the runaway lawlessness, divisiveness and corruption that American voters declined to reinstate.
President François Hollande described Trump’s victory as marking the start of “a period of uncertainty.” Previously, Hollande had said that Trump made him “want to retch.”
On a very different, but related note, Nigel Farage speaks about the Trump and Brexit revolutions:
Sharyl Attkisson explains in the next video how and why the lamebrain media were consistently wrong about the presidential election:
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a reformist Muslim, agrees with Trump’s much-maligned — and grossly distorted by the media — plans for deciding which Muslims will be allowed to enter the United States.
Conclusions
I engaged in a bit of Schadenfreude while writing this, but the problem has its serious aspects.
Many people wanted “feminist” Hillary to continue Obama’s feckless foreign and domestic policies; not enough to win the election for Hillary, but enough to make them believe that they should and would win hands-down. Since they didn’t, they concluded that something serious — they don’t know what, beyond the idiocy of American voters and a “corrupt” electoral system — must have caused “racist, antisemitic, misogynist bully” Trump to win.
Why? Academia — from kindergarten through graduate school — are one big part of the problem and the lamebrain media are another. Most of those placed in charge of them doubtless agree with Obama’s position that His world vision is right and that Populism is dangerous.
[I]nstead of laudatory songs that praise the new president, a sick new anti-Trump lesson plan that demonizes President-elect Trump and his supporters has already been offered to teachers in the San Francisco area. High school social studies teacher Fakhra Shah apparently drew up the lesson plan in a fit of spite and rage in the wee hours of the morning of November 9, right after Trump was elected. The school district reportedly has no problem with the plan, which characterizes the new president and his supporters as racist and sexist bigots.
. . . .
[Ms. Shah] warned teachers that some students may lash out at the new president using foul and obscene language. She even encouraged this because it is how kids living under white supremacy lift themselves up and fight oppression at school. Or something.
“I know that they might curse and swear, but you would too if you have suffered under the constructs of white supremacy or experienced sexism, or any isms or lack of privilege,” she wrote.
This is not “empowering” or “uplifting.” It is seriously deranged and destructive. The songs of Obama praise were disturbing and inappropriate, but this kind of propaganda is just plain evil. Instead of helping students deal with an election that maybe didn’t go the way they wanted, they are encouraging them to wallow in anger and self-pity and branding over 60 million Americans as racist and sexist bigots.
America won the election but we still have a big problem. I hope to be able to suggest fixes in a later article, but there are no easy solutions.
At the end of 2008, I worried that the Obama administration would do great damage to America–correctly, as it turned out. But no one considered my misgivings to be newsworthy.
The case is different with respect to the incipient Trump administration. Criticisms by his opponents–the ones who just lost the election–dominate the news. The Associated Press, once a respected news organization, headlines: “Trump’s staff picks alarm minorities: ‘Injustice to America.’”
Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s choices for leadership posts threaten national unity and promise to turn back the clock on progress for racial, religious and sexual minorities, civil rights leaders and others said Friday after his nomination of Alabama U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general.
That’s a remarkable beginning for a purported news story!
Sessions, a Republican, was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 after hearings in which he was accused of making racially charged remarks as a U.S. attorney. According to transcripts, Sessions was accused, among other things, of joking that he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was OK” until he learned its members smoked marijuana and of calling a black assistant U.S. attorney “boy.” During the hearing, Sessions denied making some of the comments and said others were jokes taken out of context.
Is it too much to expect them to come up with something within the last 30 years? Apparently so.
Black Lives Matter activist and Campaign Zero co-founder DeRay Mckesson said Sessions’ “documented racism and previous ineligibility for public office make him unfit to be the standard-bearer for the nation’s justice system.”
The AP cites one extreme left-wing source after another, as though they were reputable experts whose judgments are worthy of credence. In addition to the Black Lives Matter activist, the AP turns to unindicted terrorist co-conspirator CAIR for comment:
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said, “Unfortunately, these very important picks in his administration send a troubling message indicating that the bigotry we saw expressed in the campaign will continue.”
The Associated Press deems representatives of a pro-terrorist group and a violent, racist movement to be mainstream commentators, while Jeff Sessions–former U.S. Attorney, Attorney General of Alabama and Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, a Senator so respected that when he ran for re-election in 2014, the Democrats did not field a candidate against him–is portrayed as an outlier, a marginal, suspect figure. That gives you a good idea where the Associated Press lies on the ideological spectrum.
The AP retails the usual nonsense against Trump adviser Steve Bannon:
Bannon led the Breitbart website, which has been widely condemned as racist, sexist and anti-Semitic.
Really? By whom? Why? This is the lowest form of smear.
The AP goes on to quote someone named Daniela Lapidous, as though her views were particularly noteworthy:
Daniela Lapidous, a 22-year-old Jewish woman who works to fight climate change…
I am sure the humor is unintended.
…called Bannon a “misogynist and anti-Semite and an anti-climate extremist.” She said she never before felt the need to fight anti-Semitism but now thinks that she must.
“I’ve been somewhat convinced that anti-Semitism isn’t a thing in the United States anymore, but this past year, with Trump and Bannon, it’s made me scared about that for the first time in my life,” said Lapidous, who lives in San Francisco.
Why does the AP inform many hundreds of thousands of readers about Ms. Lapidous’s opinion of Steve Bannon? Has Lapidous ever met Mr. Bannon? Not as far as we know. Does she cite any basis for her opinion that Bannon is an anti-Semite? No. In fact, while Bannon likely does disagree with Ms. Lapidous about global warming–I certainly hope so!–the assertion that he is anti-Semitic is disgusting. Andrew Breitbart was strongly pro-Israel; our own Scott Johnson once toured Israel with him. Breitbart News, under Bannon’s leadership, has continued to be enthusiastically pro-Israel.
This is not hard to understand: a person who is anti-Israel is not necessarily an anti-Semite, although a great many are. But no anti-Semites are strongly pro-Israel. That combination simply doesn’t exist. Which means that Ms. Lapidous is ignorant, and raises the question: why is the Associated Press sharing with us the uninformed opinion of a foolish left-wing ideologue who is all of six months removed from college? Has the AP called you lately to ask for your opinion about prominent Democrats? Probably not.
I could go on for a long time; this AP story is a target-rich environment. Instead, let’s add just one more observation. The AP pretends that it would be a terrible thing to have a racist Attorney General. Jeff Sessions, of course, would be no such thing. But we have had a racist Attorney General, just recently: Eric Holder. Holder made it the policy of the Department of Justice to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws in favor of some ethnic groups, but not others. That is textbook racism. Did the Associated Press protest? Of course not. Holder was of their party, and shared their agenda.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had strained relations with outgoing President Barack Obama’s administration (AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski)
Cairo (AFP) – Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi praised US President-elect Donald Trump and said he expected greater engagement in the Middle East from his administration, in an interview with Portuguese media.
The former Egyptian army chief had strained relations with outgoing President Barack Obama’s administration, which had temporarily suspended military aid after Sisi toppled his elected predecessor in 2013.
“Personally I respect and appreciate” Trump, Sisi said according to an English translation of his remarks to Portuguese news agency LUSA published on Saturday.
“I believe that President-elect Trump will be more rigorously engaged with the issues of the region,” he said.
“As a matter of fact President-elect Trump has shown deep and great understanding of what is taking place in the region as a whole and what is taking place in Egypt,” he added.
“That is why I am looking forward, and I am expecting more support and more reinforcement of our bilateral relations”.
Trump’s tough-on-terrorism rhetoric has appeal among Egyptian officials, as the country faces a jihadist insurgency that has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers.
The insurgency took off after the military overthrew Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, unleashing a deadly crackdown on supporters.
Sisi, who had met Trump in September in New York, downplayed Trump’s calls to ban or extremely vet Muslims entering the United States.
“We have got to draw a distinction between the rhetoric that takes place within presidential campaigns and the real and actual administration of a country after the inauguration of a president,” he said.
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