Category Archives: Politics – international

What should Trump have said about Obama’s religious beliefs?

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This business about Obama’s religion does go on with plenty of advice with what Donald Trump should have said, and now extending to the entire Republican field who are also being asked to answer what no one can possibly know, what religion does Barack Obama really follow in his heart of hearts. Mark Steyn has his own views which he has filed under the heading, Get Lost, You Palace-Guard Creeps. Naturally you need to read it all where he provides seven different possible answers, all good. This is number six.

As to whether he’s a Christian, have you asked him whether he has attended even semi-regularly any church other than that of Jeremiah (“God damn America”) Wright? A man is free to attend the Westboro Baptist Church but if he chooses to do so I’m not obligated to defend his Christianity. And frankly, whatever the President’s personal faith, there is no dispute that his leadership of the western world has been an utter catastrophe for Christians around the planet. Some of the oldest Christian communities on earth have been entirely extinguished on Obama’s watch: in Mosul, Iraq, which was an American protectorate on the day he took office, not a single Christian remains. Every single one of them is dead or fled. So, instead of jumping through your preposterous hoops and speaking up for the most powerful man in the world, I would rather speak up for the powerless – for the Nigerian schoolgirls, for the Yazidi, for the Copts in Egypt, and for all the other beleaguered Christian communities in the world this feckless president has set alight and watched burn.

When you think about all this, what possible difference does it make what he believes when it is what he has done, or not done, that is what counts.

Advice to Trump on what he should say about Obama

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This is Steve Hayward’s advice to Donald Trump on what he ought to say to someone who accuses Obama of being a Muslim.

As far as I’m concerned, Obama’s nationality and religious faith are a settled matter. But you can understand why many Americans might think otherwise from his words and deeds in office. He has strengthened our enemies seemingly on purpose, obviously hates Jews and Israel, and really doesn’t appear to like America very much. If we did have a secret Muslim in the Oval Office, it would be hard to tell the difference from the actual Obama record. Instead of demanding my apology, the Democratic Party ought to apologize for foisting this plainly defective president on our once-great country.

You can see what Hayward thinks but knows he cannot say.

UPDATE: Then there’s this ridiculous article attacking Trump for being somehow opposed to small government and Republican principles. Here is a reply in the comments that says pretty well what I think myself:

What the author, GOP Inc and the DC Establishment fail to grasp is 25 years of saying one thing and doing the opposite tends to make people question things. How could Trump be worse than the supposed leaders of the leaders of the GOP ?They campaign on limited government, and then go to Washington and give away the store. And the most obvious example is the DC GOP wants desperately to give away the store again with amnesty to make the Chamber of Commerce donor class happy at the expense of middle and working class Americans. We’re supposed to be upset because Trump isn’t conservative enough, but the likes of Jeb and Grahamnesty are “true conservatives”? Without fixing immigration, none of it matters. And the idiots running the GOP do not grasp that. Trump, if nothing else, does. And without him no one else is even talking about immigration.

Trump is the only one anywhere talking about America as a nation state while the rest are interested only in one form or another of open borders. If they really are unaware of what is going on across the world, where our way of life is being submerged by migrants who know nothing of the principles of a free society and personal responsibility, then there should be no surprise when some of us will make one last effort to preserve for the next generations what we were able to enjoy ourselves.

FURTHER UPDATE: Here is what Roger Simon thinks Trump ought to have said:

Although it’s perhaps a bit too complicated, or even apocalyptic, for the campaign hustings, here’s how Trump should have answered the man’s question. Is Obama a Muslim? No, but he’s something even worse — a transnational progressive.

But he adds this, which is the Republican elite response of the moment to the challenge posed by Donald Trump:

On second thought, such complex ideological talk is obviously not Trump’s style. But there is someone running for the presidency with the intellectual chops, guts and speaking clarity to explain something like this to the public — Carly.

Fine and dandy, but what does she think about immigration, which is the real issue, not Obama’s religious beliefs which no one will ever know while he is still president.

And then we may add this, which is the conclusion to It’s Back: The President’s Religion Controversy:

So, America, is Barack Obama a Christian or a Muslim? Wrong question, destined to lead to an insufficient answer. I suspect that we are presided over by a modern Marxist agnostic, holding our own historical foundations and culture in contempt, while he is sympathetic with and ready to enfold the culture of people who have sworn to slaughter us. I suspect he has no desire to make us Islamic, and that President Obama is more opportunistically taking advantage of Muslim upheaval to work anarchy and chaos against the America he wants to change. Because American government is indeed founded on the Judeo-Christian principles I stated above, he exhibits the same simmering hostility to Christianity that we see generally among the “progressive” American Left.

Both of these have been taken from Instapundit

Ann Coulter is as good a friend as Israel has ever had

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I know she’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but there is no one commenting on politics I like better than her. The ill will that she attracts from the left is directly proportional to her ability to get under their skin, which she is so well able to do because the left is so lacking in irony and sense. If you can’t see what she’s saying here, it’s only because you don’t want to:

“The GOP wastes half these debates on issues on which there is already 100 percent agreement,” she told THR. “The GOP is pro-Israel. I’m pro-Israel. … How, exactly, do these Republicans propose to defend Israel, when no Republican can get elected president anymore because of immigration? How is an endless series of President Obamas going to protect Israel?”

Coulter told THR that the charge that she is anti-Semitic is “laughable.”

“Anyone with a pulse knows I am pro-Israel and against the enemies of the Jewish people. I have a whole chapter in my current book praising Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s the people attacking me who couldn’t care less about Israel or Jews,” she said.

“The hypocrites who are mad at me are the ones who support anti-Israel college professors, who refuse to condemn Islamic barbarism, who supported the overthrow of Mubarak for the Muslim Brotherhood, who spread the deadly libel that Jews in America are only successful because of ‘white privilege.'”

You can disagree with her point if you like, but to even begin to think she is anti-Semitic only shows how dense some people are.

UPDATE: Wow! Someone else agrees with me about Ann Coulter. This is Susan L.M. Goldberg discussing The Lessons Lost in the Aftermath of Ann Coulter’s F-Bomb. Here’s her crucial point:

The problem isn’t Ann, it’s us. Instead of using jabs to make an argument, we’ve traded in arguments for jabs. Ann is not made for those who’ve pandered down the Twitter hole. Nor is she designed for those seeking to worship idols instead of cultivate their own opinions. Conservatives who aren’t afraid to think critically can still pull the meat from the fat of Ann’s arguments. Did Republican candidates pander to the same old tropes in that debate? Yes. Are they ignoring the realities of immigration policies, in particular the impact they have had and will have on American political attitudes towards Israel? Yes. So, what’s your f-ing problem, again?

Despite what my PJ colleague Rick Moran thinks, Ann is far from over. She not only took advantage of the Right’s seedy underbelly of anti-Semitism, she called attention to their faux anti-Israelism to boot, and all while addressing the issue of illegal immigration. And in the world of social media, we would have missed all of that if she hadn’t Tweeted about the “f-ing Jews.” That’s sad commentary, indeed. For the rest of us that is, not for Ann.

Trump terrifies Wall Street

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Sounds good to me:

The CEO of one large Wall Street firm, who declined to be identified by name criticizing the GOP front-runner, said the assumption in the financial industry remains that something will eventually knock Trump off and send voters toward a more establishment candidate. But that assumption is no longer held with strong conviction. And a dozen Wall Street executives interviewed for this article could not say what might dent Trump’s appeal or when it might happen.

“I don’t know anyone who is a Donald Trump supporter. I don’t know anyone who knows anyone who is a Donald Trump supporter. They are like this huge mystery group,” the CEO said. “So it’s a combination of shock and bewilderment. No one really knows why this is happening. But my own belief is that the laws of gravity will apply and those who are prepared to run the marathon will benefit when Trump drops out at mile 22. Right now people think Trump is pretty hilarious but the longer it goes on the more frightening it gets.”

Trump is not going to be foxed by money manipulators and doesn’t need their cash to run. Maybe, at last, a president who won’t bail out the banks.

“The unprotected, the vulnerable, have a right and a reason to worry”

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For the first time in ages, Peggy Noonan has written a column that is right on the money: The Migrants and the Elites. In it we find this:

The gap between those who run governments and those who are governed has now grown huge and portends nothing good.

Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighborhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality—normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular.

The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder.

People in gated communities of the mind, who glide by in Ubers, have bought their way out and are safe. Not to mention those in government-maintained mansions who glide by in SUVs followed by security details. Rulers can afford to see national-security threats as an abstraction—yes, yes, we must better integrate our new populations. But the unprotected, the vulnerable, have a right and a reason to worry.

Venezuela on the Thames?

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I have friends on the left who used to say that the best thing that ever happened to their political desires was the fall of the Soviet Union. It would make it possible for socialists to win and hold governments without the example of the USSR there to scare the children. And so things seem to be turning out. To go with Bernie Sanders in the US we now have Socialist Corbyn wins UK Labour leadership in landslide.

Radical leftwinger Jeremy Corbyn on Saturday won the crown of Britain’s main opposition Labour party in a landslide victory, becoming the nation’s most left-wing political leader for over 30 years.

The 66-year-old socialist, whose policies have been compared to those of Greece’s Syriza and Spain’s Podemos, was named leader after clinching 59.5 percent of the 422,664 votes cast by Labour party members and supporters.

The newly-elected leader condemned “grotesque levels of inequality” and “an unfair welfare system” in his victory speech to party members in central London.

The world is heading in a very strange direction. Every country has a large proportion of its population who wish to repeat the success of Chavez in Venezuela. I don’t therefore believe that this is even remotely right:

Despite the “Corbynmania” of his grassroots campaign, Tony Blair — Labour’s most electorally successful leader who is now deeply unpopular over Iraq — has warned that his victory would split Labour and consign the party to electoral oblivion.

I hope he’s right but we live in very strange times.

Media ignorance and America’s alignment with the Nazis of the 21st century

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Socialism is a viral belief system that attacks people when they are young, and is especially destructive of people with university degrees in the arts and humanities. It is a kind of equaliser, that makes smart people effectively stupid. You hardly have to go very far in reading the media to see it. Which brings me to this: The world just changed forever, but you’d hardly know it from the media

It is now official. On Thursday, the Senate let the Iran deal go through – a deal that will forever change the landscape of the world in terrifying and unthinkable ways. I need not enumerate how this collaboration with Iran (and it is a collaboration) will affect Israel, the Middle East, the United States, and indeed the entire world.

Readers know all too well.

And yet, you’d hardly know how our fate was sealed on Thursday. America’s alignment with the Nazis of the 21st century hardly made a dent in media coverage.

That’s because Nazis were National Socialists. The only consistency on the left are: (1) their attacks on anyone with wealth earned by producing things (i.e. they do not to attack the wealthy as such which allows them to ignore actors and sports stars, corrupt union officials or extremely well paid media people) and (2) to attack anyone who actually bases their values on the Judeo-Christian tradition which allows them to ignore the faults that might be found in the value systems of any other religious groupings (which, of course, includes atheists).

Media ignorance is so pervasive that everyone, other than fellow socialists, is perfectly well aware of it. Watching news shows on the ABC for people without this socialist warping is astonishingly painful which is why so few people do it.

As to the specifics about media making the population ignorant of anything, the most astonishing evidence was the reaction across the world to that picture of a single drowned child. Where have these people been for the past five years not to have come across many many photos just like it and far worse. Where they have been is watching the news and reading our papers, that’s where they’ve been, the perfect recipe for becoming as ignorant as the people who present and distort the news. How else does an Obama get elected or a Bill Shorten become competitive looking forward to our next election?

The US is “led by very very stupid people!”

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You won’t see it in the papers or on the news, but this is what Donald Trump said yesterday, in Washington, in front of the Capitol with no doubt one or two journalist about: “Israel will not survive” with Iran nuclear deal in place.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump warns Americans that “Israel will not survive” if the incompetence of the political class continues to dictate our foreign policy.

Trump appeared Wednesday at the rally to stop the Iran nuclear deal in front of the U.S. Capitol. Preceded by Sen. Ted Cruz who called Trump his “friend,” and entering to raucous applause against the backdrop of REM’s classic hit “It’s The End of the World As We Know It,” Trump pulled no punches.

“Never, ever ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as our deal with Iran,” Trump said. “And I mean never.”

I think he’s going to be President.

Too stupid to survive

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I do have to tell you I am surprised to find the disappearance of our Western civilisation being looked at as an opportunity to show our compassion. We are too stupid to survive, and we will not survive. We are about to have all the diversity anyone could ever have wanted. If you are of the view that open borders work for you, and one culture is equally as worthy as any other, everything will be great. But I am just that tad bit unsure of where all this will go, since if it made no difference, Damascus would look like Stockholm. So we shall see.

In the meantime, the only place I can find where the decline and fall of the West is being charted with any kind of recognition of what is overwhelming our cultural and historic home is at Andrew Bolt. Everywhere else in the media it looks like nothing of much significance is going on. While we still have time to think about things, reading this, also from Andrew, might be worth reflecting on: With more Syrians en route, Sweden struggles to maintain identity as country where refugees are welcome. It is from the Canadian National Post and therefore will inevitably look on the bright side of life:

Another point of division is language — most refugees have trouble mastering Swedish.

That helps explain what has happened in Rosengard, a suburb of Malmo, Sweden’s third-largest city 80 kilometres from Astorp: more than 80 per cent of residents speak Arabic.

“I love it here because it feels like the Middle East,” said Taghrid, a young hijab-wearing Palestinian from Syria as she pushed a baby carriage past other women in similar attire. “It’s special. You know, people in the streets, the smell of spices.”

Such segregated enclaves are part of the problem, said Jonczyk, who moves easily between Astorp’s Swedish and Arab communities.

“What they do at home, they want to do in Swedish society and they want Swedish society to accept that,” he said. . . .

With unemployment among refugees well above 40 per cent, finding them work was one of Jonczyk’s major preoccupations. But to reach the point where they were employable was not possible if Sweden did not do a much better job of making them feel part of their new environment.

The job will now be to make Swedes feel part of their new environment.