PrairiePundit

The Hill: Fox News host Laura Ingraham reignited a feud this week over whether athletes should get political. Ingraham on her show suggested NBA stars shouldn't talk politics, telling Kevin Durant and LeBron James to "shut up and dribble." Durant and LeBron in a video had criticized President Trump. Multiple players rallied against Ingraham, and Durant called her comments "racist." The feud follows the recent debate, centered around the NFL football season, over whether players should use their platform for political statements. Last year, Trump sparked a national controversy over players who protest police brutality and racism by kneeling during the national anthem before games. He called for NFL team owners to fire players who don't stand. ... The reality is that the NFL players hurt the league and their future earnings by getting political and buying into the "hands up, don't shoot" lie that came out of events in Ferguson. NB p...

Fox News: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said in a rare public appearance Thursday he’s exhausted with how everyone seems to consider themselves a victim these days. “At some point, we’re going to be fatigued with everybody being the victim,” Thomas, the second African American to serve on the Supreme Court, said during an on-stage interview at the Library of Congress in Washington. Thomas, a conservative appointed to the bench in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, recalled recently being with a young black woman in Kansas who told him, “I’m really tired of having to play the role of being black. I just want to go to school.” “I just get worn down,” Thomas said. The justice said his grandfather had a tough life but never considered himself a victim. “When I was a kid, there were tons of people who were in really bad circumstances,” Thomas said. “My grandfather would not let us wallow in that.” Thomas added: “He’s my hero. He’s the single greatest human being I’ve ...

Brahma Chellany: Pakistan has long proven adept at diplomatically levering its weakness into strength. Now it is using the threat of its possible implosion to rake in record-level bilateral and multilateral aid. Bountiful aid has been pouring in without any requirement that Pakistan address the root cause of its emergence as the epicenter of global terrorism — a jihad culture and military-created terrorist outfits and militias. Even though the scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates not so much from the Islamist mullahs as from generals who reared the forces of jihad, rewards are being showered on the procreators of terrorism. The Mumbai terrorist attacks, far from putting Islamabad in the international doghouse, have paradoxically helped open the floodgates of international aid, even if involuntarily. Between 1952 and 2008, Islamabad received over $73 billion as foreign aid, according to Pakistan's Economic Survey. But in the period since the November 2008 Mumbai strikes...

Jerusalem Post: Four weeks after the cessation of Operation Cast Lead, the IDF finally opened its dossier on Palestinian fatalities on Sunday for the first time , and presented to The Jerusalem Post an overview utterly at odds with the Palestinian figures that have hitherto formed the basis for assessing the conflict. While the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose death toll figures have been widely cited, reports that 895 Gaza civilians were killed in the fighting, amounting to more than two-thirds of all fatalities, the IDF figures shown to the Post on Sunday put the civilian death toll at no higher than a third of the total. The international community had been given a vastly distorted impression of the death toll because of "false reporting " by Hamas, said Col. Moshe Levi, the head of the IDF's Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), which compiled the IDF figures. As an example of such distortion, he cited the incident near a UN school in Jabalya ...

Globe and Mail: Most people remember the headlines: Massacre Of Innocents As UN School Is Shelled; Israeli Strike Kills Dozens At UN School. They heralded the tragic news of Jan. 6, when mortar shells fired by advancing Israeli forces killed 43 civilians in the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. The victims, it was reported, had taken refuge inside the Ibn Rushd Preparatory School for Boys, a facility run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The news shocked the world and was compared to the 1996 Israeli attack on a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon, in which more than 100 people seeking refuge were killed. It was certain to hasten the end of Israel's attack on Gaza, and would undoubtedly lead the list of allegations of war crimes committed by Israel. There was just one problem: The story, as etched in people's minds, was not quite accurate. Physical evidence and interviews with several eyewitnesses, including a teacher who was in the schoolyard at the time of the s...

Alan Dershowitz: The Hamas "dead baby" strategy - to cause as many civilian casualties as possible by firing its deadly rockets from schools and densely populated areas - is producing understandable outrage around the world. What is not understandable is why the outrage is directed against Israel , which is a victim of this strategy, rather than against Hamas, which is its perpetrator. Hamas knew exactly what it was doing when it fired more than 6,000 rockets at Israeli kindergartens, elementary schools and playgrounds from behind its own children. It was playing Russian roulette with the lives of Israeli children in order to provoke a defensive response from Israel. Hamas knew that Israel, like any democracy, would have to take whatever military action was necessary to stop the rockets. As Barack Obama put it when he visited Sderot, a town that had been victimized by more than 1,000 rockets and several deaths: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my ...

Power Line: It is commonly said that by storing weapons in mosques and firing rockets and mortars from residential areas and school yards, Hamas is using human shields in Gaza, a war crime. But the truth is really worse than that. Hamas doesn't endanger civilians in hopes that it will deter retaliation; it does so in the hope and expectation that civilians will be killed and wounded. This tactic is part of a larger strategy to create tragedy and disaster, which the Palestinians have developed into something akin to an industrial process. They build tunnels, but they do not build bomb shelters. They do not, apparently, suspend classes in schools in the midst of bombardments. And Hamas, with the tolerance if not approval of most Gazans, uses schoolyards as launching zones for rockets and mortars. Think about it: is there anything about a schoolyard that makes it a particularly desirable place from which to fire ordnance? No. Hamas uses schools (and mosques, and residential areas ge...

Nick Cohen: ... There were plenty of leftish people in the 20th century who excused communism, but they could at least say that communism was a left-wing idea. Now overwhelmingly and everywhere you find people who scream their heads off about the smallest sexist or racist remark, yet refuse to confront ultra-reactionary movements that explicitly reject every principle they profess to hold. Why is the world upside down? In part, it is a measure of President Bush's failure that anti-Americanism has swept out of the intelligentsia and become mainstream in Britain. A country that was once the most pro-American in Western Europe now derides Tony Blair for sticking with the Atlantic alliance. But if Iraq has pummeled Mr. Blair's reputation, it has also shone a very harsh light on the British and European left. No one noticed it when the Berlin Wall came down, but the death of socialism gave people who called themselves "left wing" a paradoxical advantage. They no longer had...

Dean Godson: The “anger” of some Muslim community “representatives” with the Independent Police Complaints Commission — after its “whitewash” of the Met’s conduct during the Forest Gate raid — deserves to be taken with one big pinch of salt. The terms of trade are slowly shifting against their brand of victim culture. And, deep down, they know it. The late Frank Chapple, the long-time leader of the electricians’ union, was wonderfully dismissive of such noisy groupuscules. “ ’Ere, boy, know what these Trots are like?” he would ask rhetorically of the Militant Tendency. “They’re like the Red Indians surroundin’ the ’omestead in those early cowboy films. The camera flits from one window to the next and it looks like there’s ’undreds of ’em. In fact it’s the same three geezers runnin’ round.” The same sort of characters also peddled a narrative of a “community under siege” after the recent Birmingham raids. But for all the talk of an imminent explosion, there was no riot in Brum — or Fore...