A History Lesson on Cuba for President Obama

Did the U.S. really "exploit" pre-Castro Cuba?

Humberto Fontova

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

April 12, 2016

US President Barack Obama and others stand in front of a monument to Che Guevara during a ceremony at the José Martí Memorial in Havana, Cuba on March 21, 2016. (AP Photo / Dennis Rivera)

“I know these issues are sensitive, especially coming from an American President. Before 1959, some Americans saw Cuba as something to exploit, ignored poverty, enabled corruption." (U.S.  President Barack Obama, March 22, Havana Cuba.)

“I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime." (U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Oct 24, 1963.)

It’s understandable that two U.S. Presidents should hail the resourcefulness and guile of American businessmen. But liberal Democrats aren’t exactly renown for that sort of thing. And read right, the above statements imply exactly such praise—if somewhat backhandedly. The (seemingly) apologetic statements also imply condescension for those poor, stupid, corrupt Cuban natives who were such easy marks for sharp Yankee robber barons.

You’d never guess this from the media, Hollywood or your professors (or speechwriters for Democratic presidents), but in 1953 more Cubans vacationed in the U.S. (and voluntarily returned to Cuba) than Americans in Cuba. Yes, pre-Castro Cubans found the U.S. “a nice place to visit, but they certainly wouldn’t want to live there.” All this despite the friendliness and quaint habits of the natives -- and despite the ability to emigrate from Cuba virtually at will and obtain U.S. visas virtually for the asking.  During the 1950s and based in Florida, Sheriff Joe Arpaio would have been lonelier than the Maytag repairman.

Obama and Kennedy were describing a nation (pre-Castro Cuba) with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western Hemisphere, the 13th lowest infant-mortality on earth and a huge influx of immigrants. Furthermore, in 1959 U.S. investments in Cuba accounted for only 14 percent the island’s GNP, and. U.S.-owned companies employed only 7 per cent of Cuba's workforce.

In 1958 the Cuban Embassy in Rome had a backlog of 12,000 applications for immigrant visas from Italians clamoring to immigrate to Cuba. "A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in -- and how many want out," famously quipped Tony Blair. Well, millions of people “voted with their feet” in favor of pre-socialist Cuba.  

Indeed, pre-Castro Cuba took in more immigrants per capita (primarily from Europe) than the U.S., including the Ellis Island years. This flood of (fellow First World) “wetbacks” was so alarming that in 1933, as a stopgap against all these foreign rascals horning in on the “Cuban dream,” the Cuban government passed laws more draconian than anything in Arizona or Georgia today -- laws to make the hearts of Donald Trump supporters sing with joy. A majority of employees at all Cuban businesses, this law mandated, had to be “natural-born” Cubans.

Every single item above thoroughly-documented here.

Oh, I know, I know…none of this was featured in Godfather II. And as we hear from some of contemporary America’s top educators:

“I mean everybody who saw Godfather II knows what it was like when Castro took over.” (Chris Matthews, Hardball, Oct. 20, 2011.)

“All I know about pre-Castro Cuba I learned from the Godfather II.” (Jon Stewart, July 23, 2008.) 

The Media loves to dwell on how a few U.S. mobsters once bribed a few Cuban politicians to allow a few casinos in Havana. To hear them tell it, this tiny sideline of an economy that was overwhelmingly Cuban-owned, export and manufacturing-oriented, and provided Cubans with a per capita income higher than that of most Europeans made Cuba a hopelessly wretched place screaming for a communist revolution.

Actually: in 1955 Cuba contained a grand total of three gambling casinos, the biggest was at the Tropicana and featured ten gambling tables and thirty slot machines. The Hotel Nacional featured seven roulette wheels and twenty-one slot machines. By contrast, in 1955 the single Riviera Casino in Las Vegas featured twenty tables and one hundred and sixteen slot machines. This means that in 1955: one Las Vegas Casino had more gambling action than all of Cuba.

Cuba’s tourism industry as a whole generated $60 million in 1958. Havana by itself had 42 hotels. The Mob reputedly had financial interest in 7 of these–and these didn’t include among them Cuba’s biggest hotel, the Habana Hilton. Instead the biggest hotel on the island was majority-owned by the pension plan of the Cuban Federation of Gastronomic Food Workers. This fully-documented historical datum, needless to add, doesn’t mesh well with the fairy tale narrative about Cuba’s horribly exploited working class of the time, now does it?

Later the Castro regime’s partnership with Colombia's cocaine cowboys made mob boss Meyer Lansky's deal with Batista look like a nickel and dime gratuity. And the murder tally from the Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas, who partner with Cuban officials in the Yucatan, equals about one St Valentine’s Day Massacre every ten hours for five years.  

"We lived like kings in Cuba," revealed Medellin Cartel bosses Carlos Lehder and Alejandro Bernal during their trials in the '80s and '90s. "Fidel made sure nobody bothered us.”

In 1996 a federal prosecutor in south Florida told the Miami Herald, "The case we have against Raul Castro right now is much stronger than the one we had against Manuel Noriega in 1988."  Four grand juries at the time had disclosed Cuba's role in drug smuggling into the U.S. The Clinton administration, hellbent on cozying up to Castro at the time, refused to press ahead with the case against the Castro brothers' dope trafficking.

You might recall that a similar crime by a Latin dictator (Manuel Noriega) got his nation (Panama) invaded by 26,000 U.S. troops. In the process, 23 American servicemen were killed and 350 Panamanians (both military and civilian) died. As a result, Panama’s sovereign head of state Manuel Noriega was captured, tried, convicted and jailed for drug trafficking.

The U.S. response to the Cuban dope-traffickers, mass-murderers and terror-sponsors -- as dramatized quite recently with Obama's “historic” presidential visit -- has been markedly different. 

 Tags: Barack Obama, Communism, Communist Cuba, Fidel Castro

The Late Late Show

By Mark Steyn
http://www.steynonline.com/
April 12, 2016


Trevor Philips, right, and women wearing the Burka   GETTY IMAGES

When it comes to querying the benefits to the west of semi-Islamization, Trevor Phillips packs more of a punch than most of us. First, he's black, which shouldn't matter but does. Second, he's the former head of Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission, one of those identity-group grievance bodies which made such considerations matter (as did the Commission for Racial Equality, which Mr Phillips previously chaired). Third, he's the guy who introduced the word "Islamophobia" into the English language, in a celebrated report on "discrimination" two decades ago.

Now, in a new Channel 4 documentary with an accompanying poll of British Muslim attitudes, he has issued a mea sorta culpa:

For a long time, I too thought that Europe's Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain's diverse identity landscape. I should have known better.

In other words, pace the likes of Louise Arbour, this is not the same as Italian Catholics, Eastern European Jews and South Asian Hindus. Something different is happening.

I suppose congratulations ought to be in order to Mr Phillips for belatedly seeing what's in front of his nose. But as The Spectator's Douglas Murray writes:

Now if you accept the reality that Phillips now does accept – and that mainstream opinion across Europe is coming to accept – would one particular answer not stand out as eminently sensible at this juncture? Such as turning that flow [of immigration] into the merest trickle? If a community is currently causing a lot of challenges and looks like posing them for many generations to come, why on earth would you not slow that 'steady reinforcement'? Other than out of fear that you might be branded an 'Islamophobe'?

Good question - especially put to the man who mainstreamed the word "Islamophobia" and thereby passed out the cudgel with which which so many who raise the question have been bludgeoned into silence. Douglas isn't wrong. As I wrote a couple of weeks back:

While David Cameron and John Kerry and all the rest assure us that terrorism is nothing to do with Islam, you can't help noticing that, in Europe, the less Islam, the less terrorism.

It shouldn't be that simple, but it is: that's why Brussels and Paris get bombed, but not Warsaw and Prague. But it applies to broader questions of social cohesion, too: the less Islam, the less terrorism, and the less polygamy, the less female genital mutilation, the less Jew-hate, the less gay-bashing, and the less self-segregation into no-go emirates where the state's writ no longer runs. When you import Muslims, you are importing a certain percentage not just of "radical" "extremist" terrorists but of unexceptional run-of-the-mill misogynists, bigots and Islamic supremacists. So why keep adding to your problems?

Ah, but Mr Phillips isn't quite ready to go there. Douglas Murray again:

I know from experience what an honourable and decent man Trevor Phillips is. So here is a prediction. In ten years time he will agree with people like me that the numbers matter, and that it is purest insanity to continue encouraging through migration the growth of a population which raises so many problems of integration once it is here. Of course for another ten years those of us who do say that will be pelted with the same insults Phillips and some of his colleagues set in motion all those years ago. And when he does say it there will be as much rejoicing as there is today for these latest statements. The only snag is that ten years from now, when Trevor finds it comfortable to say this, it will be even later in the day to turn these trends around.

And the hour is already late. Take this piece from The New York Times, whose vapid headline - "Blaming Policy, Not Islam, For Belgium's Radicalized Youth" - betrays no hint of the most interesting nugget in the story:

"Our cities are facing a huge problem, maybe the largest since World War II," Mr. Goldstein said. "How is it that people who were born here in Brussels, in Paris, can call heroes the people who commit violence and terror? That is the real question we're facing."

Friends who teach the equivalent of high school seniors in the predominantly Muslim districts of Molenbeek and Schaerbeek told him that "90 percent of their students, 17, 18 years old, called them heroes," he said.

These aren't like those hypothetical UK poll questions: How many young Muslims want to live under Sharia? How many favor death for apostasy? This is hard and real: How many high-school seniors rejoice in the actual here-and-now slaughter of their "fellow" "Belgians"?

But hey, let's keep importing Islam and see if we can get that number up to 93, 94 per cent!

Meanwhile, those who make the mistake of getting a little ahead of Trevor Phillips' slow boat to Damascus know what to expect:

Dutchmen who tweet their opposition to the construction of "refugee" centers in their towns receive visits from police who threaten them with charges of sedition. A Belgian who spoke out about Muslim children in the city's schools cheering the recent Brussels attacks welcomed three policemen to his door. And a London man who tweeted about his decision to confront a Muslim over her views on the Brussels attacks was arrested, had his home raided, and all his computer equipment seized. More well-known, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel was caught on an open microphone asking Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to curtail speech critical of "the wave of Syrian refugees entering Germany."

This passage from the above piece is chilling:

Considerable light is shed on how such prosecutions are possible by the recently published autobiography of Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League...

Robinson again faces incarceration on April 14, and has frequently stated his belief that the ultimate objective of his incarceration is to facilitate his murder in British prisons.

I've looked fairly closely at the British state's curious obsession with Mr Robinson, and his conclusion seems to me entirely reasonable.

A final word from Trevor Phillips:

"Twenty years ago, when, as chair of the Runnymede Trust, I published the report titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, we thought that the real risk of the arrival of new communities was discrimination against Muslims.

"Our 1996 survey of recent incidents showed that there was plenty of it around. But we got almost everything else wrong."

But the people who got everything wrong are still in charge and, unlike Mr Phillips, not yet ready to admit their error.

The Case for Jesus: The Evidence of the Gospels

by Dwight Longenecker

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/

April 10, 2016

Attending Bob Jones University made me skeptical of fundamentalists. Attending Oxford University made me skeptical of liberals. I came to question the Bob Jonesers’ young-earth creationism and their Biblical literalism, but at Oxford I learned to question the assumptions (and therefore the conclusions) of the liberals’ Biblical criticism, their doubt about the historical Jesus and their unsparing deconstruction of the Biblical texts and their authorship.

By the time I was finished studying theology at Oxford I felt like the boy in the emperor’s parade, but there were two emperors—the fundamentalist and the liberal scholar—and they were both naked.

The granddaddy of the liberal Biblical scholars was Rudolph Bultmann who believed there was next to nothing we could know about the historical Jesus. The old joke is that Bultmann was asked how he would react if archeologists discovered the bones of Jesus Christ. Bultmann would reply, “So he existed after all?”

Bultmann’s de-mythologizing theories were the product of over three hundred years of increasingly skeptical scholarship combined with early twentieth century academic fascination with folklore and myth. It was all the rage to study the development of religion and religious literature, so Bultmann and his followers decided that the New Testament was the result of religious myth building. This academic fashion item combined with their deep-seated Protestant skepticism produced the foundation for modern Biblical scholarship. The weak point in their theorizing is that they knew next to nothing about the Jewish context of the New Testament.

My seminary education at Oxford in the 1980s was the product of a long line of New Testament liberal scholarship. I remember being told that the entire New Testament had to be dated after 70 AD because Jesus had foretold the destruction of Jerusalem. Because prophecy was impossible, the gospels which record Jesus’ glimpse into the future had to be written after the event, and if they were written after 70 AD then Jesus disciples Matthew, Mark, Luke and John could not be the authors of the gospels ascribed to them.

I was critical of the critics. Their theory only worked because they assumed prophecy of the future was impossible, but this ruled out a supernatural cause for the prophecy without discussion simply because they deemed the supernatural to be impossible. It was like Hume’s circular dismissal of miracles: “Miracles can’t happen because miracles are impossible.”

Furthermore, it seemed to me that one didn’t even have to posit the supernatural to allow that “prophecy” can happen. Jesus only needed a basic understanding of human psychology, history, current events, and politics to predict ultimate disaster for the Jews if they didn’t change their ways. One does not kick against the armies of Imperial Rome without consequences.

Nevertheless, various scholars still promote what these increasingly out-of-date theories. The most well-known have managed to package their scholarship in attractive little books for a popular audience. Marcus J. Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Bart Ehrman are among them. Mr. Ehrman is best known and has made a name as a New Testament scholar and popular author. A former Evangelical Christian, now an atheist, Mr. Ehrman is heavily invested in the promotion of his own literature that debunks the Bible.

Scholars like Mr. Ehrman wear their long list of academic accomplishments like the emperor’s new clothes. Without their qualifications it is difficult to question their conclusions. Their authority as published experts would seem unassailable. Fortunately, there are an increasing number of boys in the crowd watching the emperor’s parade who can expose their nakedness. Which brings me to Brant Pitre….

Mr. Pitre is no academic slouch. Professor of Sacred Scripture at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, he holds a Masters from Vanderbilt and a Ph.D. in Christianity and Jewish Antiquity from Notre Dame. Whereas Mr. Ehrman’s background is in established Protestant Biblical textual criticism, Mr. Pitre’s area of expertise is the contemporary Jewish context of the gospels. Mr. Pitre’s main assertion is that to understand the true meaning of the New Testament we must understand the Jewish cultural and religious context in which from which it originated. Picking through the texts without understanding the wider context is relatively fruitless and will lead to false conclusions. This in itself is a brilliant stroke of common sense. Imagine reading say, Dante’s Divine Comedy but not bothering to learn about the culture, language and worldview of medieval Catholic Italy.

Mr. Pitre’s new book The Case for Jesus attacks the foundation of modern Biblical scholarship and in the process calls out the naked emperor Mr. Ehrman. There are two basic foundations on which the modern theories stand: the late dating of the gospels and their subsequent anonymous authorship. Mr. Pitre takes apart the idea that the gospels must have been written after 70 A.D. and suggests another definitive date. Instead of basing the theories of dating around the destruction of Jerusalem, Mr. Pitre argues, we should use the martyrdom of Peter and Paul in 65 A.D. under Nero.

The theory goes like this: The Acts of the Apostles ends with Peter and Paul still living. It was therefore written before 65 A.D. Acts was the second of Luke’s volumes. If Acts is composed before 65 A.D. then the gospel of Luke preceded it. If (as the textual critics insist) Luke was dependent on Matthew and Mark, then Matthew’s and Mark’s gospels were also composed before 65 A.D. This moves all the gospels back to around 60 A.D.—fewer than thirty years after the death of Jesus.

Scholars like Mr. Ehrman argue that because the gospels were written decades after the events, they must have been anonymous. However Mr. Pitre shows that there are virtually no anonymous manuscripts of the gospels in existence. From the earliest dates they were ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These two basic arguments are presented solidly and cogently in an irenic and professional manner.

Mr. Pitre’s expertise in the first-century Jewish context of the gospels provides the skill set for him to examine the other main question of the book, “Did Jesus really present himself as God incarnate?” Mr. Ehrman & Co. dismiss the idea of the divine Jesus as a late Hellenic invention while Mr. Pitre shows the claims to divinity for Jesus of Nazareth to be completely consistent with first-century Jewish hopes and beliefs.

Mr. Pitre’s book is a must read for all who are even the least bit interested in New Testament scholarship. It is written in an accessible and winning style, and I’m delighted to learn that Mr. Pitre is working on a new Introduction to New Testament studies. Let’s hope the new generation of scholars like Mr. Pitre will continue to be the boys at emperor Ehrman’s parade, and as the greying atheists like Mr. Ehrman retire, a new breed of scholars with sharper brains, fresh insights, and a more balanced approach will step into their shoes.

Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. 

Fr. Dwight Longenecker is a graduate of Oxford University. He is the author of sixteen books and contributes to many magazines, papers and journals includingCrisis, Integrated Catholic Life, National Catholic Register and Intercollegiate Review. Visit his blog at Standing on My Head, read his latest book The Romance of Religion and be in touch at dwightlongenecker.com

Ian McEwan Notes That 2 + 2 = 4 — Horrified, the LGBT Orwellians Make Him Take It Back

By Brendan O'Neill — April 11, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Ian McEwan

For a worldview that claims to be all about freedom and choice and “being oneself,” transgenderism sure is tetchy and intolerant. Consider what has just happened to the celebrated British novelist Ian McEwan. Last week, during a speech at the Royal Institution in London, McEwan took a genteel swipe at the politics of identity. He said identity politics is becoming increasingly consumerist, where we now pluck a ready-made “self” from “the shelves of a personal-identity supermarket.” The making up of one’s identity has gone so far that “some men in full possession of a penis are identifying as women and demanding entry to women-only colleges,” he said. Then came his killer line: “Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of people with penises as men.”

Can you guess what happened next? Yes, McEwan was subjected to a Twitch hunt, to that 21st-century bloodsport in which anyone who expresses an unpopular view or makes a less than PC utterance or simply misspeaks a little will be “called out” (shamed) by the bedroom-bound, Twitter-living, self-styled guardians of correct thinking. Twits went berserk over his apparently perverse linking of penises with maleness. They branded him a bigot, weird, a transphobe. Trans-rights activists put the boot in, too. Stonewall, the LGBT activist group, slammed McEwan for being “uninformed” and said his weird worldview doesn’t only “denigrate the trans experience, it denies its very existence.” Paris Lees, a trans woman and journalist, scolded McEwan, telling him his “ideas about penises are outdated.” He should apologize, the mob said.

And he did. All the virtual tomato-throwing at this heretic who dared to say that people with penises are men had the desired effect. It elicited a public backtrack. In an open letter in the Guardian, McEwan accused some of his critics of being “righteous and cross,” yet he then bowed and scraped before the trans religion. Transgenderism “should be respected,” he said. Then, most strikingly, he obediently expressed the key tenet of the trans ideology: “Biology is not always destiny.” Remarkable. In the space of a few days, he went from raising interesting, awkward questions about trans identity to repeating in a national newspaper the trans mantra that “biology is not destiny.” For those of us who believe in freedom of thought, it was an ugly sight, reminiscent of those poor souls dragged before the Inquisition and set free only when they dutifully bought into their inquisitors’ belief system and publicly declared: “I believe in Jesus Christ.”

We all know by now that speaking your mind can be a risky business in the 21st century. Holders of unpopular opinions on climate change, multiculturalism, and a host of other ideological outlooks that have come to be force-fielded from ridicule or questioning now face being hounded off campuses, branded “deniers” (a favorite insult of the Inquisition, too), and Twitch-hunted. But what’s significant about the mauling of McEwan is that his speechcrime was not to express an outré opinion — it was to state what the vast majority of people consider to be a straight-up fact, a biological reality, a self-evident truth: that people with penises are men. 

McEwan didn’t insult trans people or use derogatory terms against them or do that Germaine Greer thing of referring to a trans woman as “a man who gets his d*ck chopped off.” He simply said that he holds to the biological fact of sex, and that having a penis is a pretty good indicator of being male.

The moral shaming of McEwan for stating what most people consider to be an objective fact shows how Orwellian the trans ideology has become. We’re living through an era of trans Orwellianism. Almost everything the trans lobby does smacks of Big Brotherism.

There’s its howling off campuses, its attempted silencing, of any feminist or thinker who is skeptical of the idea that men can become women. There’s its strict policing of people’s pronoun use and its punishment of those who “misgender” people: After Caitlyn Jenner came out, giving rise to a great religious fervor, an activist group sent word-watching bots out on Twitter to catch and correct anyone who was committing the speechcrime of saying “he” rather than “she” in relation to Jenner. There’s its memory-holing of inconvenient historical facts: In some countries, you can now have your sex changed on your birth certificate when you decide to swap genders, which represents a flagrant rewriting of a publicly recorded, historically indisputable fact, of a biological reality. “It’s a boy,” the doctor and everyone else recorded, yet now those records are trampled on.

And now there’s its punishment of people for saying there’s such a thing as reality, such a thing as tangible, measurable facts. This, too, is straight out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In that novel, O’Brien, Big Brother’s torturer, ridicules our hero Winston Smith for believing in objective reality. He takes Winston to task for believing “reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right,” and that “the nature of reality is self-evident,” when in fact “whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth.”

“This is a fact that you have got to relearn,” says O’Brien — just as McEwan and other mad believers in self-evident, tangible underpinnings to maleness and femaleness must now learn the higher, better truth of the trans lobby. Today, what the trans lobby holds to be the truth is the truth, and woe betide anyone who says, “But people with penises are men, surely?’

The McEwan madness shows what is at stake in the trans debate: the freedom not only to dissent from fashionable nonsense and to be skeptical of activists’ claims about the crazy fluidity of gender, but also the freedom to express a fact; to be objective; to resist the lure of a swirling relativism that says that nothing is solid and instead to say: “This thing is true. This thing is a fact.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston cleaves to the idea that 2 + 2 = 4 in the face of tyrannical, truth-rewriting Party officials who tell him that 2 + 2 = 5 if they say it does. Today, those who believe in freedom of speech must defend the right of individuals to say “people with penises are men,” in the face of authoritarian forces insisting that people with penises can be women and, in essence, that 2 + 2 = 5.

— Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and a writer for The Spectator.

RELATED: When the Lies Are Mandatory — Can the First Amendment Survive the Sexual Revolution?

RELATED: American Jacobins: Sexual Revolutionaires Prepare the Battlespace for a De-Christianized America

MORE:

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/rejoice-ian-mcewan-has-withdrawn-his-penis-remark/

The War On Women Moves to Restrooms

By Clarice Feldman

http://www.americanthinker.com/

April 10, 2016

To accommodate the perceived wishes of a very small number of people, the federal government and many states are placing women and girls at risk of rape and assault in restrooms.

There are about a mere 700,000 transgender individuals in the U.S., or 0.3% of the adult population. As John Hinderaker correctly notes -- that makes them almost as rare as unicorns. 

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that allowing men who decide they really want to be women to use women’s restrooms is a dangerous idea: not to the wise men of Charlotte, North Carolina who passed an ordinance allowing men to use women’s’ restrooms if they believed they were mistakenly inhabiting men’s’ bodies. Wiser heads in the North Carolina legislature prevailed and passed a law “barring cities from adopting anti-discrimination laws that are inconsistent with, or in addition to, the laws in effect at the state level, which already cover race, religion, national origin, color, age, biological sex and handicaps.”

Mark Dayton, Andrew Cuomo, Apple, Pay Pal and Bruce Springsteen Gird for the Restroom Battle

To signal their belief that the transgendered have more rights than women and girls who want to be free of assault, rape, and child molestation when at their most vulnerable, the governors of New York and Minnesota, responded by banning nonessential travel state employee travel to that state. (One wonders why they just didn’t ban all non-essential out of state travel, but that would be too fiscally responsible, I suppose.) PayPal cancelled a planned center in Charlotte. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was one of several high-profile tech CEOs who signed a letter to Republican Gov. Pat McCrory calling on him to repeal the legislation.

“We are disappointed in your decision to sign this discriminatory legislation into law,” the letter reads. “The business community, by and large, has constantly communicated to lawmakers at every level that such laws are bad for our employees and bad for business.” 

There’s a problem, of course, with this corporate virtual signaling as the Washington Times explains:

PayPal’s international headquarters are located in Singapore, where sexual contact between males is punishable by up to two years in prison [snip]The company has a software development center in Chennai, India, where same-sex marriage is prohibited.[snip] “PayPal does business in 25 countries where homosexual behavior is illegal, including 5 countries where the penalty is death, yet they object to the North Carolina Legislature overturning a misguided ordinance about letting men in to the women’s bathroom?” said Mr. Pittenger, a Republican, in a statement. “Perhaps PayPal would like to try and clarify this seemingly very hypocritical position.

Apple’s stance is no less hypocritical. It has stores in Saudi Arabia “where gay people are regularly executed in public and cross-dressing is also a criminal offense. Pro-gay and trans advocacy are illegal, as is every religion except Islam.”

Saying, "To my mind, it's an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress,” Bruce Springsteen (remember him?) cancelled a planned concert in the state. 

Powerline’s Hinderaker concludes, “There was a time when, if you had said that one of our major political parties would someday consider it a vital civil right that men be allowed to use women’s bathrooms, people would have thought you were nuts. They would have been right.”

The Restroom Battle Generals: Lhamon and Jarrett

How did we get to this absurd place? You won’t go wrong if you point your finger at the administration. The U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Division set this ball rolling.

Federal education authorities, staking out their firmest position yet on an increasingly contentious issue, found Monday that an Illinois school district violated anti-discrimination laws when it did not allow a transgender student who identifies as a girl and participates on a girls’ sports team to change and shower in the girls’ locker room without restrictions. 

Education officials said the decision was the first of its kind on the rights of transgender students, which are emerging as a new cultural battleground in public schools across the country. In previous cases, federal officials had been able to reach settlements giving access to transgender students in similar situations. But in this instance, the school district in Palatine, Ill., has not yet come to an agreement, prompting the federal government to threaten sanctions. The district, northwest of Chicago, has indicated a willingness to fight for its policy in court. 

The Education Department gave 30 days to the officials of Township High School District 211 to reach a solution or face enforcement, which could include administrative law proceedings or a Justice Department court action. The district could lose some or all of its Title IX funding.

This same department has done battle with various school districts which have tried to accommodate the needs of all students by, for example, allowing transgender students to change behind curtained areas or use specially designated single bathrooms.

I consider this a serious overreach of the department’s mandate, but it is typical of the various Civil Rights Divisions in the Department of Justice and the various departments of the federal government, which through fiats have imposed preposterous rules upon localities. Local governments then have to decide whether to forego funding from the federal government and/or expensive litigation to oppose these dictates. Of course, if you send your daughters to private schools as Obama does, or choose to use bathrooms in Moslem schools, you probably can feel safe in the girl’s restrooms and gym changing areas.

That this nonsense comes directly from the White House is obvious.

The most powerful woman in American politics sent a not-so-subtle warning to the state governments of North Carolina and Mississippi today that she was prepared to send the DOJ attack dogs to do battle against those states’ recent religious freedom laws that would protect businesses from having to abdicate their religious views. 

The threat was in regards to those recently passed state religious freedom laws which would primarily serve to protect religious groups and some private businesses from being harassed and/or sued for not participating in events held for gay and transgender people. 

Ms. Jarrett, speaking at an event that calls for more gender-neutral toy offerings for children (don’t ask) spoke with media after the event and made clear her intentions to utilize the DOJ to pressure states into backtracking on their most recently enacted religious freedom legislation:
“…I can tell you that we think it’s wrong, we think it’s destructive and we don’t think it reflects the better ideals or who we are as a country.”

At PJ Media, Hans A. Von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams expose the far left orientation of those hired by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division who have been working to keep election fraud alive: “when it comes to American elections, the Obama Justice Department has taken the side of criminals over law-abiding citizens. It has taken the side of racial discrimination over equal enforcement of the law. It has used selective enforcement of the law to help Democrats retain power,” the authors conclude, detailing the bizarre actions of this Division.”

There’s no reason whatsoever to suppose the Department of Education’s Civil Rights division is differently staffed. Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights who is imposing the bathroom rules on high schools has overreached in connection with colleges as well, reforming them in her own image.

It was she who’s been forcing colleges to accept the “Dear Colleague Letter” by her predecessor in office which even her boss Deputy Education Assistant Secretary Amy McIntosh conceded is an overreach of Lhamon’s authority, which she seems to consider made her “feelings Czar” over higher education. The letter mandates the standard of proof colleges should use in judging claims of sexual harassment is the low bar of whether the person charged is "more likely than not" to have violated a poorly written harassment policy to suffer disciplinary action. The division also enforces the 2013 DOJ/DOE “Blueprint Letter” which vaguely defines sexual harassment as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” 

Colleges that follow these directives on sexual harassment rather than fight or lose funding are now being sued successfully for violating the rights of those disciplined under these same rules. 

Lhamon’s zeal even entangled her in the now thoroughly debunked University of Virginia rape hoax where, relying on the Rolling Stone reporter’s mischaracterization of a school official’s remarks, she offered up that they were “deliberate and irresponsible,” and opined:

“Nothing annoys me more than a school not taking seriously their review from the federal government about their civil rights obligations.”

Once again the bureaucrats responsible for idiotic policies remain unaccountable for their folly, leaving behind ruined lives and costly litigation for which we will be paying the price.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/04/the_war_on_women_moves_to_restrooms.html#ixzz45QdKczxO
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Inconvenient Genocide

The reason that Obama has ignored the mass slaughter of Mideast Christians.

Caroline Glick
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
April 8, 2016





ISIS militants march a dozen Egyptian Coptic Christians along a Libyan beach before beheading them in a mass murder Feb. 19, 2015. (Photo: Al-Hayat Media/Zuma Press /Newscom)


The Christian communities of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon are well on the way to joining their Jewish cousins. The Jewish communities of these states predated Islam by a millennium, and were vibrant until the 20th century. But the Arab world’s war on the Jewish state, and more generally on Jews, wiped out the Jewish populations several decades ago.

And now the Christian communities, which like the Jews, predate Islam, are being targeted for eradication.

The ongoing genocide of Middle Eastern Christians at the hands of Sunni jihadists is a moral outrage. Does it also affect Israeli national interests? What do we learn from the indifference of Western governments – led by the Obama administration – to their annihilation? True, after years of deliberately playing down the issue and denying the problem, the Obama administration is finally admitting it exists. 

Embarrassed by the US House of Representatives’ unanimous adoption of a resolution last month recognizing that Middle Eastern Christians are being targeted for genocide, the State Department finally acknowledged the obvious on March 25, when Secretary of State John Kerry stated that Islamic State is conducting a “genocide of Christians, Yazidis and Shi’ites.”

Kerry’s belated move, which State Department lawyers were quick to insist has no operational significance, raises two questions.

First, what took the Obama administration so long? Persecution of Christians in Iraq began immediately after the US-led coalition brought down Saddam Hussein in 2003. With the rise of Islamic State in 2012, the process of destroying the Christian community went into high gear. And now these ancient communities are on the brink of extinction.

In Iraq, Christians comprised 8 percent of the population in 2003. Today less than 1% of Iraqis are Christians. In Syria, the Christian community has lost between half and two-thirds of its members in the past five years.

One of the appalling aspects of ISIS’s deliberate, open targeting of Christians for destruction is how little resistance it has received from local Sunni populations. As Raymond Ibrahim from the David Horowitz Freedom Center has scrupulously documented, the local Sunnis have not stood up for their Christian neighbors, who have lived side-by-side with them for hundreds of years. Rather, in areas that have been conquered by ISIS, the local Sunnis have collaborated with their genocidal masters in raping and murdering Christian neighbors, plundering their property, destroying their churches, and driving them from their ancestral homes.

Although precise data is hard to come by, it is clear that thousands of Christians have been slaughtered. Thousands of Christian women and girls have been sold as sex slaves in ISIS slave markets, subjected to continuous, violent rape and beatings. Nuns and priests have been enslaved, crucified, mutilated, kidnapped and held for ransom, as have lay members of Christian communities. Christians have been burned alive.

For years, the administration said that the persecution doesn’t amount to genocide because according to ISIS’s propaganda, Christians are allowed to remain in their homes if they agree to live as dhimmis – that is, without any human rights, and subjected to confiscatory taxation.

But as Nina Shea from the Hudson Institute has reported, these claims were shown to be false in Mosul, Nineveh and other places where ISIS has claimed that such practices were instituted.

The jihadist genocide of Christians isn’t limited to Iraq and Syria. Boko Haram – ISIS’s affiliate in Nigeria – is undertaking a systematic campaign to annihilate Christianity in Africa. ISIS’s affiliates in Sinai and Libya have similarly targeted Christians, staging mass beheadings and other monstrous acts.

And of course, a region needn’t be under direct ISIS control for Christians to be targeted for destruction. The Easter massacre in Pakistan was further evidence that wherever radical Islamists gain power, they use it to murder Christians.

And as Larry Franklin from the Gatestone Institute noted in a recent article, the exodus of Christians from the Palestinian Authority is the direct consequence of deliberate persecution of Christians by the PA.

Given the prevalence of Christian persecution, why is the West – which is overwhelmingly Christian – so reticent about mentioning it? And why are Western leaders loathe to do anything to stop it? There are two ways to end genocide. First, you can defeat those conducting it on the battlefield.

If you destroy the forces conducting the genocide, then the genocide ends.

The second way you can stop genocide is by evacuating the targeted population and providing its members with refuge.

After stipulating that ISIS is carrying out a genocide, Kerry made clear that the US will not defeat ISIS to end it. Instead, Kerry said, “We must bear in mind... that the best response to genocide is a reaffirmation of the fundamental right to survive of every group targeted for destruction. What Daesh [ISIS] wants to erase, we must preserve. That requires defeating Daesh, but it also requires the rejection of discrimination and bigotry.”

Kerry then explained that the US’s plan is to cultivate the formation of a multicultural society in Syria. Given the brutal nature of the war, Kerry’s plan is tantamount to saying the US intends to defeat ISIS and rescue those it is currently exterminating by bringing unicorns and leprechauns to the slave markets of Raqqa. Substantively, Kerry’s plan is to deny Christians refuge, and to abandon them to the mercy of their murderers.

While delusional, Kerry’s statement was in line with the Obama administration’s timid, feckless military campaign against ISIS. Everyone knows that the US military could take down ISIS in a matter of weeks if Obama ordered it to do so.

But rather than act decisively, the US has limited its operations to timorous aerial bombing.

By conducting a barely there campaign, Obama tells the world that although he will be happy to take credit for any defeat ISIS suffers, he will not allow the US to lead the fight against the jihadist death machine.

As for providing refuge to the populations targeted with genocide, the raw data make clear that Obama does just the opposite. He is providing refuge for Sunni Muslims, who are not being targeted for genocide, which is being conducted by Sunni Muslims.

As Ibrahim has documented, although Christians made up 10% of the Syrian population in 2011, they comprise a mere 2.7% of the Syrian refugees the Obama administration has allowed into the US. And when presidential hopeful Senator Ted Cruz called for the US to provide refuge to Christians, who pose no security threat and are targeted with genocide and persecution while banning Muslim immigration, Obama accused him of bigotry.

Despite the fact that FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the US lacked the capacity to effectively screen Muslims from Syria for ties to jihadist groups, Obama said that a policy of saving those marked for extinction over those who come from the population conducting the genocide is “shameful,” and “not American.”

Beyond refusing to take the necessary steps to ensure that persecuted Christians are rescued from annihilation, the State Department has been rejecting visa requests from Christian activists and leaders from persecuted communities to visit the US to share information about their suffering with the American public. This, at the same time that the administration has welcomed Muslim jihad sympathizers, including Muslim Brotherhood members, to Washington.

For instance, last May, the State Department denied a visa to Sister Diana Momeka, an Iraqi nun and ISIS survivor. Momeka was the only Christian member of a delegation of persecuted minorities. Representatives of every other group received visas. It took a public outcry to force the State Department to reverse its decision.

Also last year, the State Department gave visas to all Muslim regional governors in northern Nigeria to participate in a conference sponsored by the US Institute of Peace. They denied a visa to the region’s only Christian governor, Jonah David Jang. Christian activists alleged that Jang was denied a visa because he spoke up to US officials about anti-Christian persecution in 12 states in northern Nigeria that have instituted Sharia law.

What accounts for this behavior? The answer is not ignorance, but ideologically- motivated bigotry. The Aid to the Church in Need organization explained in its 2015 report on Christian persecution, “Christians have been targeted [because]... Christianity [is seen] as a foreign ‘colonial’ import. Christians are seen as linked to the West, which is perceived as corrupt and exploitative.”

In another report, the group explained that the Western media has avoided covering the story of the Islamic genocide of Middle East Christians because of “misplaced embarrassment about the 19th-century colonial powers evangelizing ‘the natives’ in far flung places.”

In other words, Middle Eastern Christians, whose communities predate Islam, are targeted because they are perceived as Western implants.

And the West ignores their suffering, because the Left in the West perceives them as Western implants.

In both cases, prejudices, rooted on the one hand in jihadist Islam, and on the other hand in Western self-hatred and post-colonialism, reach the same bigoted conclusion: the only “authentic” people in the Middle East are Muslims.

Everybody else is a colonial implant. And as such, they deserve what they get.

This then brings us back to Israel, and the Jews.

The same ideological prejudice that refuses to recognize that the Islamic State is Islamic, refuses to recognize that jihad is unique to Islam, refuses to recognize that Christians as religious minorities are being targeted for annihilation, and refuses to recognize that the Christians of the Middle East are ancient peoples who have lived in their communities since the dawn of Christianity, also refuse to recognize the rights of the Jewish people as the indigenous people of the land of Israel.

This is the reason that Western governments, led by the Obama administration, are unwilling to defeat ISIS. This is why they are giving preference to Muslim asylum-seekers, who they are incapable of screening, over Christians, who it is unnecessary to screen.

This is the reason that the same governments are far more willing to attack Jews for living beyond the 1949 armistice lines, in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria – the cradle of Jewish civilization and the heartland of the land of Israel, than they are willing to end their support for the PA which sponsors and celebrates terrorism. This is why the same governments eagerly embrace every allegation of Israeli racism, real or imagined, while they ignore, or even fund racist Palestinian efforts to deny Jewish history, a history which leads to the inevitable conclusion that the Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel.

The reason Obama refuses to protect Middle East Christians from extinction is because he cannot rescue them – either on the ground or by ensuring they can flee to safety – without abandoning his ideological faith that the only “natives” of the Middle East are the Muslims.

 Tags: Christian Persecution, Christianity, ISIS, Middle East