Another Role for UNRWA

A writer of a Letter to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal wondered why the UNWRA still was involved in handling Palestinian refugees instead of the UNHCR, which handles all other refugees worldwide.  This includes Palestinian refugees in the Gulf states, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, but not those in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza, and other geography close to or abutting Israel.

Here’s what the UNWRA did in support of its “refugees,” in particular Hamas’ 2014 terrorist war against Israel in furtherance of their own Gaza “refugees.”

  • warehoused the terrorists’ rockets for them
  • allowed the terrorists to dig their tunnels under UNRWA facilities
  • participating in the terrorists’ staged propaganda

As another letter-writer in the same chain noted, UNRWA exists because those supporting terrorism demand it—especially, contra that writer, those in the UN.

There are Security Breaches

…and there are security breaches.  The NLMSM wants to talk about some, and it wants to spike reports about others.

Here’s one that the NLMSM is doing its best to spike.  It seems that Peter Strzok, a most highly paid and senior HR specialist in the FBI, had a meeting in 2016 with two people the then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough had sent to brief him and three other FBI folks on a…matter…concerning

an “anomaly” that their forensic analysis had found in Clinton’s server.

According to [Congressman Louie (R, TX)] Gohmert, the inspector general discovered that, with four exceptions, “every single one” of Clinton’s emails—more than 30,000—”were going to an address that was not on the distribution list.”

In other words, according to the information Gohmert received from the intelligence inspector general, something was causing Clinton’s server to send copies of all of her email communications outside of the country “to an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia.”

If true, this means that Clinton’s email communication with her top aides, department leadership, ambassadors, and other officials, including President Barack Obama, may have been read by an alien entity, perhaps a foreign power hostile to the United States. That could include confidential, sensitive, and even classified information about our foreign policy or our allies.

In response to Gohmert’s question about that during Strzok’s testimony before a joint committee hearing, Strzok claimed that while he could remember the fact of the meeting, he could remember none of the substance of it.  Which means he’d chosen to do nothing about the information the two IC IG personnel had just told him about.

Apparently, to paraphrase David Frost’s paraphrase of Richard Nixon, if the Clinton does it, that means it’s not a security breach.

It’s also interesting that Frank Rucker and Janette McMillan, the two people McCullough had sent to do the briefing, have not been called to testify.

Musical Desks

The Acting Director of the Veterans Administration is replacing his acting head of Veterans Health Administration with another acting head.  The current acting head needs replacement, not through any malfeasance, but because the incumbent acting head is moving to take another position within the VA.

Bad as the VA is, it isn’t helped by this instability in its management team.  Not a bit.

This continues to illustrate the waste of resources that is the VA.  Get rid of it, and use its current and future budgets for vouchers for our veterans.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Rights

Some people have more of them, others have fewer.  That’s the position of the People’s Republic of China.

The Hong Kong National Party is being threatened by the PRC government, through its Hong Kong Secretary for Security, John Lee Ka-chiu, with being banned.  The heinous crime of which the party (and its leader, Andy Chan) is speaking too freely in favor of freedom for Hong Kong.

Or, as another man put it a while back, some people are just more equal than others.

Media Bias

We’ve seen how Facebook openly favors liberal news outlets; now we can see the unconscious bias against conservative outlets that media moguls have.

Facebook at least has started paying lip service to (and may actually be serious about) correcting its own bias.  The company held an allegedly off-the-record meeting with a dozen or so publishing executives (allegedly because of the leaks of the meeting’s contents by participants).  BuzzFeed‘s Editor in Chief Ben Smith, though, objected to the presence of “six conservative-leaning publications among the dozen or so outlets” present.  Apparently, actual balance between conservatives and liberals is biased representation.

Mr Smith said that the number of conservative publications in attendance indicated that Facebook had bought into the idea, promoted primarily by conservatives, that mainstream outlets such as the New York Times are liberal and should be counterbalanced by right-leaning opinion outlets, said people familiar with his remarks.

As if the NYT is a bastion of conservatism and needs no counterbalance.  Or, as if liberalism itself needs no counterbalance.

Then he attacked the journalistic standards of The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet that was represented at the meeting.  Lacking coherent argument, the liberal Smith stooped to character assassination, this time of a competitor.  He’s not alone in the character assassination; Lydia Polgreen, HuffPost Editor in Chief, in a canonical example of a pot complaining about a kettle, echoed Smith’s plaint.

It’s bad enough that the NLMSM is biased.  It’s bordering on dangerous when the NLMSM can no longer discriminate bias from balance.