Daily Archives: February 19, 2017

A Win for Free Speech and Gun Safety – New York Times

Posted: February 19, 2017 at 11:02 am


New York Times
A Win for Free Speech and Gun Safety
New York Times
As the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit held on Thursday in striking down the key parts of the law, this is an obvious violation of the First Amendment, which generally prohibits restrictions on speech based on what's being said. It ...

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It’s free speech – Pueblo Chieftain

Posted: at 11:02 am

Typical behavior of the neoconservatives is to suppress First Amendment free speech rights, right to assemble, voting rights and a litany of other rights, when it applies to others who do not agree with them.

The El Pueblo History Museum drama is a prime example. Two self-appointed Catchers in the Rye decide they are the arbiters of what constitutes free speech. The Chicano group or any other group that rented the museum has every right to express their political views as they see fit. The objections of state Rep. Clarice Navarro, R-Pueblo, and Brian Mater have no legal standing.

The effigy of a Donald Trump pinata is free speech. Pinatas are made to be broken. So when the Trump pinata was struck and broken, that was offensive to Navarro and Mater. If the pinata effigy would have been of Hillary Clinton, you would not have heard a peep out of them.

The definition of effigy is a sculpture or model of a person, animal or object. The crucifix Jesus nailed to the cross is an effigy. There have been numerous times when a prayer group, a Mass or benediction have been held with a large crucifix or other effigy present at the museum and other publicly owned buildings.

The First Amendment free speech clause, does not differentiate between repudiation or adulation:

The Orwellian big sister and her mini-me are now monitoring the situation; so are the righteous citizens of Pueblo and the American Civil Liberties Union.

No apologies are needed from Museum Director Dawn DiPrince. Wake up. Its free speech.

Frank Peralta

Pueblo

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Free Speech Vs. ‘Hate Speech’ – PJ Media

Posted: at 11:01 am

I recently attended a symposium, held at the University of Toronto and sponsored by a group of politically savvy libertarian and conservative students, on the topic of free speech and expression in the current repressive cultural and political milieu. The audience of almost every other conservative symposium I have attended has been composed chiefly of elderly white men, with a modest sprinkling of women and a sparse handful of younger people. On this occasion I was gladdened to note that the age gap had been bridged, dividing equally between older and younger, while the distaff representation was comparatively prominent.

The fact that the symposium was organized by two student groups worried about their political and economic future, Students for Liberty and Generation Screwed, explained the mixed composition of the conference attendees and signaled a more hopeful future for the nascent conservative movement growing on campus as well as in the non-academic world. This young, right-leaning cohort -- politically active, intellectually engaged, well-educated and civil -- are in marked contrast to their leftist counterparts consisting of a mlange of snowflakes and hooligans, who were soon to make their presence known at the event.

The issues discussed at the symposium largely involved the nature and definition of speech violence, or what is called hate speech, criminalized in several countries and jurisdictions. Both sides of the dispute, left and right, agree that limits to freedom of speech are necessary, but disagree as to where these limits should be placed. The left, whether radical or moderate, regards as felonies forms of speech that offend a privileged identity group, whether racial, ethnic, religious (i.e., Muslims), or gender-based (i.e., women, gays, trans-people), or criticizes the ideological positions such favored groups adopt. Additionally, a prime tactic of the left is what we may call pre-emptive suppression. Speaking engagements are often shut down before or during an address, making debate and discussion impossible. Censorship and repression thus become acceptable methods of dealing with such perceived transgressions as open colloquies, lectures and conferences.

The conservative right believes that speech should be mainly unfettered, except when it damages reputations through lies or urges acts of physical violence. Of course, speech itself can be an act, as philosopher J.L. Austin has shown in How to Do Things with Words: in his most famous example, when the minister states I now pronounce you husband and wife, an act has been performed since it changes the status of the participants.

We should note, however, that words critical of an individual or a group are not performative (or illocutionary, in Austins phrase). If I criticize Islam as a violent faith, I do not thereby make it violent or directly instigate violence against it. My words do not change the reality of Islam, whatever it may be. In the U.S., even words advocating violence (except in official or legally constituted circumstances, or in situations where there is a clear and present danger) are not considered performative. The 1969 Brandenburg vs. Ohio Supreme Court case ruled that speech can be prohibited if it is "directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action." (Italics mine). In the words of the Legal Encyclopedia discussing the case, the First Amendment protects speech unless it encourages immediate violence or other unlawful action. (Italics mine). In this instance, both the temporal element and unequivocal incitement are crucial. Mere advocacy is another question entirely and is not prohibited, although here the conservative argument tends to draw the line, even if the U.S. Supreme Court did not.

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Educational Reformer Hirsch Promotes Knowledge Against Its … – National Review

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E. D. Hirsch, Jr., who will turn 89 years of age in March, is one of the true intellectual heroes of our time, and his work, on two levels, deserves the widest dissemination and discussion. His new book, Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories, is both a summation and an extension of his lifes work as both a K12 educational reformer (creator of the K6 Core Knowledge elementary-school curriculum, now in use in over 1,200 schools in the U.S. and abroad) and a literary theorist of the highest distinction. In the former category, Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute is surely right in calling Hirsch the most important educational reformer of the past half-century. (See my article on Hirsch from 2013.)

Unlike several other distinguished critics of the romantic-progressive tradition of Rousseau, Emerson, Whitman, John Dewey, and Deweys now millions of educational disciples (in the U.S. and abroad), Hirsch has not just doggedly and lucidly critiqued the contradictions and ineffectiveness of pantheistic romantic naturalism as applied to elementary education (though he has done this profoundly and superlatively well). He has also inspired a grass-roots movement involving thousands of school administrators, teachers, parents, and other individuals of good will in shaping the Core Knowledge curriculum over the last 30 years as a realistic alternative and antidote to the dominance of the ideas, methods, and curricular disorganization and ineffectuality of the existing American elementary-education establishment, which is still universally and exclusively dominant in the nations schools of education. In Why Knowledge Matters Hirsch predicts the downfall of this regime, which it has been his lifes Herculean labor to expose and critique an outcome devoutly to be wished, but still a struggle against long odds of institutional and intellectual self-interest, close-mindedness, and momentum. The replacement in New York City of Schools Chancellor Joel Klein (a late but influential convert to Core Knowledge) by demagogic mayor Bill de Blasios appointment of Carmen Faria, for example, is a serious defeat for educational reform that shows that this war has many a battle yet to come. (See Robert Pondiscios comments in The Education Gadfly.)

At the level of literary theory, 50 years ago Hirsch established himself as one of the major world voices in the theoretical investigation and illumination of the nature and uses of language with an outstanding scholarly book entitled Validity in Interpretation. In this brilliant, patient, deeply learned, now-classic book Hirsch explained and defended the very possibility and procedures of objectivity in literary interpretation, vindicating while reformulating and updating the central civilizing Western tradition of rationality and language from Plato and Aristotle through St. Augustine to Samuel Johnson and Schleiermacher and the 20th century. Hirschs earliest efforts in this program earned the approval of C. S. Lewis, whose own The Abolition of Man (1943) is one of the classic defenses of the same essential Western (and world) tradition.

It may seem to anyone outside of a university both incredible and absurd that intellectuals would deny or dispute the very possibility of objective interpretations of oral and written language, as the possibility of such objectivity is the very foundation of our social, political, and legal order and our sanity as human beings with an irreducible stake in normative ideas of rationality and ethics. Hirschs friend and sometime colleague Roger Shattuck (19232005) noted while doing jury duty in Boston toward the end of his life that the very operating assumptions of our justice system were utterly dependent upon the possibilities of rational-ethical communication, of truth, and of fairness, but that these possibilities were implicitly or explicitly denied by our dominant academic theories of language (as I discussed here). The learned foolishness that great orthodox satirists such as Pascal, Swift, Orwell, and C. S. Lewis so brilliantly mocked is at flood tide in our universities today.

Hirschs high-level theoretical work in Validity in Interpretation is thus not ultimately remote from the concerns he has expressed and the arguments he has made in his books on K12 education since the publication of the ground-breaking Cultural Literacy 30 years ago. Like the great Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis (18941978), Hirsch insists on the communal and creative character of language and on the essential continuity of human civilization as mediated through its greatest tool language itself. But unlike Leavis, Hirsch brings to bear profound linguistic and philosophical learning that has enabled him to battle and expose the various seductive intellectual schools, structures, and voices that would obfuscate or obliterate the central rational-linguistic reality, trajectory, and momentum of the quest for objectivity. By means of decent human-linguistic tradition, every human person is implicitly disposed to seek the true and good reality and justice. Hirschs learned dialogue with and critique of Anglophone, German, French, and Italian theorists their own texts in their own languages is an enormously impressive scholarly achievement, conducted with extraordinary precision, modesty, and an unfailing personal but disinterested disposition to the trans-personal realms of epistemology and ethics, of the true and the good.

Nor is Hirsch easy to pigeonhole politically as an ideological partisan, despite the dogged efforts of the romantic-progressive K12 establishment (e.g. Howard Gardner of Harvard Graduate School of Education) to paint him as a conservative. Like his 1996 The Schools We Need and Why We Dont Have Them, the new Why Knowledge Matters contains an epigraph from the Prison Notebooks of the Italian anti-Fascist Communist Antonio Gramsci, who spent the last eleven years of his life (192637) in one of Mussolinis prisons. Criticizing the new progressive education in Italy in the first decades of the 20th century, Gramsci wrote in 1929:

The new education created a kind of church that paralyzed pedagogical research. It produced curious aberrations like spontaneity, which supposed that the childs brain is like a ball of string that the teacher should help unwind. In reality, each generation educates and forms each new generation. Education opposes the elemental biological instincts of nature; it is a struggle against nature, to dominate it...

Two of the great themes of Hirschs profound critique are present here: the romantic-progressive establishment (John Dewey was at the height of his power at Columbia in 1929) as a new religion or religion-replacement (a kind of church), and Nature as its God-term, an allegedly obvious, perspicacious criterion for the true and the good. Hirsch could as easily have found this critique in conservatives such as Irving Babbitt, T. E. Hulme (whom he has quoted), Russell Kirk, or the renegade Protestant thinker R. J. Rushdoony (The Messianic Character of American Education (1963), a classic book that deserves a new edition), or in the writings of dissenting centrists such as William Chandler Bagley of Columbia Teachers College (whom he has praised and quoted). But he has clearly not wished to allow simplistic, binary, premature polarization to typecast him as a mere defender of things-as-they-are (or things-as-they-were: laudator acti temporis). He really believes in the possibilities of modern education to improve individuals (and nations) and to transcend gender, race, and class, in the real prospect of equal educational opportunity in having access to the aggregated public goods of a civilization, mediated by the K12 schools.

Why Knowledge Matters reiterates several of the arguments that Hirsch has been making in one form or another in his books since the 1960s, including his early study of romantic pantheism, Wordsworth and Schelling (1960). Its appendix The Origins of Natural-Development Theories of Education is a very useful overview of this theme of intellectual-literary-educational history that is indispensable for understanding the present incoherence and ineffectuality of our public elementary schools and their ideological basis.

But the most notable, revealing feature of Hirschs new book is his discussion, and documentation, of the truly shocking, catastrophic recent decline of public education in France. Although Jean-Jacques Rousseau (171278) was the fountain of romantic progressivism in education (Emile, 1762), and his descendants have been numerous in the literary and educational fields, this radicalism in literature, linguistics, philosophy, and education did not deeply affect or mar the delivery of very-high-quality education at the early levels in France (the radicalism of French universities and Paris-based culture is another story) until quite recently. The older tradition of high French rationalism Pascal and Descartes are major figures retained great force in the authoritative creation and maintenance of a very high standard of public education in the 19th and 20th centuries. (Noam Chomskys Cartesian linguistics pays tribute to this older, non-reductive, high rationalism.)

What Hirsch shows beyond any doubt is that this great, enviable French public achievement, from preschool through high school, has been grievously, perhaps irreparably, damaged by the 1989 Socialist educational reforms under the leadership of Socialist education minister (later prime minister) Lionel Jospin a truly new, catastrophic French Revolution, 200 years after the ambiguous political one. (See my own Saint Socrates, Pray for Us, on the continuing cultural fecklessness of the French Left.) Based on a wealth of longitudinal, statistical data on the effects of the so-called Jospin Law (loi Jospin) of 1989, it has been apparent since at least 2007 that the enviably effective pre-1989 French public-education system has suffered a profound decline in effectiveness, plausibly due to the importation of banal but bacterial romantic-progressive bromides lamricaine.

Ironically, though it can be argued that these ideas originated with Rousseaus Emile, France itself had successfully resisted them for 225 years: The school as a naturalistic-pantheistic church (Tocqueville thought democracies were prone to this); the childs brain [conceived as] a ball of string that the teacher should help unwind; curriculum as child-centered, and instruction individualized and differentiated; whole-class instruction derided and neglected; early reading and writing mistrusted and delayed. The results of the attack of the Jospin reforms on Frances long-effective public-education system have now been described in a series of important books (see also Rachel Donadios recent piece on French cultural anxiety, despite its neglect of the educational issues). From one of them, Marc LeBriss 2004 Et vos enfants ne sauront pas lire...ni compter (And your children will neither know how to read...nor to count), Hirsch quotes one of his epigraphs: One sees immediately that this kind of system will diminish acquisition of specific knowledge by taking refuge in vague evocations of vague general skills. Voil! A 2007 book edited by the distinguished French mathematician Laurent Lafforgue and a colleague is entitled La Dbcle de lcole: Une Tragdie Incomprise (The Debacle of the School: An Uncomprehended Tragedy). As Hirsch points out, Dbcle is the term the French apply to their countrys military defeat [rapidly by the Germans] in 1940, and Lafforgue develops that historical analogy in his introduction to the essays. His view...is that top French intellectuals made big avoidable mistakes in 1989, just as higher-ups had made serious, avoidable military mistakes in 1940.

Hirsch refers his readers to the astonishing 2007 data compiled by the French Ministry of Education and recently made available on the Web. In doing so, he extends his own insistence on using large-scale, valid empirical evidence for the evaluation of educational programs, not only or mainly the undependable, small-scale, even intra-district or intra-school research that so many teachers colleges and education schools have used in imprudent, invalid, and bamboozling ways over the last hundred years. Hirsch himself had helped document statistically the major decline in American secondary-school outcomes under the progressive regime in Cultural Literacy (1987) and then, in more detail, in The Schools We Need and Why We Dont Have Them and The Knowledge Deficit (2006), where he wrote: Verbal SAT scores in the United States took a nosedive in the 1960s, and since then they have remained flat. In The Schools We Need he quoted a usefully brief assessment by David Barulich: In 1972 over 116,000 students scored above 600 on the verbal S.A.T. In 1982 fewer than 71,000 scored that high even though a similar number took the exam. Progress it is not: rather, decapitation.

In the case of the French development, we may hypothesize or surmise that the great French traditions of rationalism, including scientific rationality but not restricted to it, successfully resisted the various seductive heresies of Romantic naturalism pioneered in the Francophone world by Rousseau and his disciples. But the anarchic influence of restless, quicksilver, novelty-obsessed, radical French intellectuals (68ers: soixante-huitards), whose writings have done so much to eviscerate and undermine the Anglo-American universities since the 1960s, finally penetrated the public-school system of which they were the clever, voluble beneficiaries. The left-wing intellectuals Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida were both on the educational committee whose report inspired Lionel Jospins disastrous major reform initiative of 1989. As Hirsch points out, in 1989, the Left in the [French] National Assembly (Socialists plus Communists) had an absolute majority; they could pass any law they wished. The vote was 280 in favor, 266 against. The conservatives were not persuaded. But the guillotine was nevertheless used on an excellent educational system.

In passing the loi Jospin, the French Left betrayed the traditions of the moderate Enlightenment and classical rationalism to which great French intellectuals such as Tocqueville, Jacques Maritain, tienne Gilson, Denis de Rougemont, and Raymond Aron had remained faithful. Hirsch himself has been one of the chief articulators of a centrist Anglo-American tradition, which his own education at Cornell and Yale by scholars such as M. H. Abrams, Ren Wellek, and William K. Wimsatt had conveyed. His own career is a vital contribution to the reality of that tradition and its applicability, both at the popular, democratic-republican level of schooling and at the erudite intellectual level of worldview and theory. In this regard he is a worthy inheritor of long and deep civilizing traditions, starting with Plato and the Bible (in the current book he quotes the Bible against the elementary-school overvaluing of imagination, a word tarnished by promiscuous overuse in educational matters) and including thousands of decent intellectuals (and many millions of decent people) in what Charles L. Glenn Jr., another great contemporary educational thinker, has called the radical middle.

Among these educational thinkers of great influence in the Anglo-American world in and since the 19th century was Matthew Arnold (182288), one of whose greatest curricular insights (about teaching the knowledge of the best that has been thought, said, and created in the world to everyone) lies behind Hirschs Core Knowledge curriculum. In the introduction to a 1906 Everyman edition of Arnolds Essays in Criticism, G. K. Chesterton wrote:

Our actual obligations to Matthew Arnold are almost beyond expression....The chief of his services may be perhaps stated thus, that he discovered (for the modern English) the purely intellectual importance of humility. He had none of that hot humility which is the fascination of saints and good men. But he had a cold humility which he had discovered to be a mere essential of the intelligence. To see things clearly, he said, you must get yourself out of the way....He realized that the saints had even understated the case for humility. They had always said that without humility we should never see the better world to come. He realized that without humility we could not even see this world.

Our actual obligations to the heroic E. D. Hirsch are very great.

M. D. Aeschliman is a professor of Anglophone culture at the University of Italian Switzerland (Lugano), a professor emeritus of education at Boston University, where he taught from 1996 to 2011, and the author of The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism (1983, 1998). He first wrote about E. D. Hirsch in 1988.

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The Two Atheisms: How to Know Smart People Cannot Get Is From Ought – Patheos (blog)

Posted: at 11:00 am

When I was a boy, so long ago the New Atheists were young men, atheism was sold to us in many a science fiction book as freedom from the sexual repression that was killing us all. Someday, writers like Isaac Asimov promised, sex would be less of a mystery and a great deal more available. Meetings of atheists were proudly freewheeling.

They were governed by science and reason so they were going to get rid of archaic sex rules. At least in their conferences and sub-culture they did.

How did it go?

It did not go well. A new generation has arisen to suggest that the end result was using women like tissue paper. I know this is true, since my students had to deal with atheist big shots who seemed to think every female worker was a dating opportunity. A new generation of atheists rightly challenges the ugliness, but good luck prevailing.

The alpha males have no reason to do more than give lip service to any system you create. On the other hand, as they age, they might worry about an ethical system that might suggest they have a duty to die and stop using up resources. A Christian leader who has lived his life consistently with Christian values knows he can find a Christian place to let him die with dignity. An atheist leader has no such promise.

Our morality endures. Atheist morality keeps trying to say we ought when all they have is this is. Atheist morality changes all the time and yesterdays virtue (free love!), becomes todays vice. Sadly, there is no reasontothink that atheist leaders will listen to critics for now.

Is still does not give an ought and people with power in a system without transcendent morals will find reasons to ignore any barriers to their desires. Fighting the good fight is hard enough for those of us who believe in a real hell and moral absolutes. . . we have our own hypocrites, but at least they are hypocrites. Religion helps buttress morality.

Expose a pastor as a hypocrite and you harm his ministry. If you are creating your own meaning, you cannot be a hypocrite, just sly. You might be a cretin, and some of the leading atheists plainly are, but that judgment is based only on someone elses self-created meaning. When a traditional Christian sins, he might try to hide it, but he cannot claim it is virtue. The same thing has not been true with theStar Trek: the Original Series generation of atheist leaders.

They meant to set up a system where middle aged white men got power and women.

They are those who fame got them accessto the liquor cabinet as a localized celebrity and then they abused the liquor and the power. There is a reason that atheists lose more of their own children than any other group: the movement is ugly to the core. Findone atheist, secular, or non-religious web site that isnot dominated by being against everyone else and you have found the black swan. They exist, but they are rare.

When atheism is mostly white people angry with bad religious childhoods, there is not much future to the movement.Atheism is the only mostly white, mostly Western phenomenon in the world that gets good press as the cutting edge of history and that is not enough. Atheist kids get it and most leave as a result.They know the truth: the whiter the town, the more secular it is. The more diverse the town, the more religious it is.

Atheism cuts you off from African culture, Indian culture, and the parts of Chinese culture that are not running atheist motivated concentration camps. What do you have? The truncated bits of the West that does not include Shakespeare, Bach, Newton, Handel, or Michelangelo. You do get Isaac Asimov, the Amazing Randi, and Daniel Dennett.

It is all a bit sad.

If you inherited a Christian culture from your folks, you might leave, because you think you can keep the good and get rid of perceived evils. What do you inherit as an atheist? Read the Atheist Net. Eliminate rants against religion and you are left with almost nothing. . . except a population shrinking in every part of the world that is not mostly white. You are angry white males that hate Trump.

Thats not much on which to base a culture. Christians can be scientists, philosophers, and (mostly) ignore atheists. Periodically atheists get control of a country and start killing people, but fortunately, our American brand of atheists seem far from powerand more benign.

The second generation of atheists, the converts from some religion and the few kids who stayed, are busy trying to deeply reform the misogynistic, exploitative culture of the old atheist boysnetwork. I wish them luck. However, they should be warned: they too have a morality based on nothing other than what they prefer. They will be radically rebooted by the next generation, because all atheism has culturally been against something. When it is not us, they have to have the last generation of atheists.

They are a culture of repudiation and anger based on hurt. If religious people were not bad, there would soon be no atheists. For that reason, all of us who love God, Love Himself, cannot be triumphant in the rise of a second atheism. Mostly we look to our own problems. . . except when a cock a doodle doo from some new atheist reminds us that atheism has not been harmless. You can be moral without religion, though most agree religion helps, but there is vanishingly little evidence that an atheist can stay moral without religion.

Religious minorities all over the world have left and formed new cultures. Atheists stay and hope to hijack what is there. If not, they have never succeeded in making a culture.

It has been damnable, even by the standards of this generation of atheists. Because of reason and experience, I am a Christian. Maybe I am wrong and some other interpretation of reality is better, but this much is relatively sure: atheism is a dead end. They did not get ought from is in 1970 and my bet is they are doing no better now.

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Modi to unveil 112-ft tall Shiva idol in Coimbatore on February 24 – Hindustan Times

Posted: at 10:59 am

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will unveil a 112-ft tall face of Lord Shiva or Adiyogi at Isha Foundation in Coimbatore on Mahashivaratri, which is on February 24.

In a statement Isha Foundation said on Saturday that the face will be largest such on the planet, recognising the first yogis unparalleled contribution to humanity.

This iconic face symbolises liberation, representing the 112 ways in which one can attain the ultimate through the science of yoga, the statement said.

According to the Foundation, on Mahasivaratri (February 24) Modi will light the sacred fire to commence the Maha Yoga Yagna across the world when one million people will take oath to teach a simple form of yoga to at least 100 persons in the coming year.

For the first time in the history of humanity, Adiyogi introduced the idea that the simple laws of nature are not permanent restrictions. If one is willing to strive, one can go beyond all limitations and attain liberation, moving humanity from assumed stagnation to conscious evolution, Isha Foundation founder Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev said in the statement.

Describing the significance of Adiyogi, Vasudev said: It is essential that the coming generations on this planet are seekers, not believers. As philosophies, ideology, belief systems that dont stand the test of logic and the scientific verification will naturally collapse in coming decades, you will see the longing for liberation will rise. When that longing rises, Adiyogi and the science of Yoga will become very important.

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Defense Secretary Mattis issues new ultimatum to NATO allies …

Posted: at 10:57 am

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis says the NATO military alliance is central to ties between America and Europe and remains of importance to the United States. (Reuters)

BRUSSELS Defense Secretary Jim Mattis issued an ultimatum Wednesday to allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, warning that if they do not boost their defense spending to goals set by the alliance, the United States may alter its relationship with them.

I owe it to you all to give you clarity on the political reality in the United States and to state the fair demand from my countrys people in concrete terms, Mattis said. America will meet its responsibilities, but if your nations do not want to see America moderate its commitment to the alliance, each of your capitals needs to show its support for our common defense.

The statements came during a closed-doors meeting with defense ministers from other NATO countries and were provided to reporters traveling with the defense secretary to Brussels. It marks an escalation in Washingtons long-running frustration that many NATO countries do not spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product as they have pledged. President Trump often made that point during his upstart run for the White House, at various times calling the alliance obsolete while grousing that its 28 members need to pay their fair share.

[Trumps calls for Europe to increase defense spending could force other upheaval]

Mattis, a retired Marine general, recalled Wednesday that when he was NATOs supreme allied commander of transformation from November 2007 to September 2009, he watched as then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned NATO nations that Congress and the American people would lose their patience for carrying a disproportionate burden of the defense of allies.

That impatience, Mattis said, is now a governmental reality.

No longer can the American taxpayer carry a disproportionate share of the defense of Western values, Mattis said. Americans cannot care more for your childrens security than you do. Disregard for military readiness demonstrates a lack of respect for ourselves, for the alliance and for the freedoms we inherited, which are now clearly threatened.

Currently, just five of NATOs 28 countries spend at least 2 percent on defense: the United Kingdom, Estonia, Poland, Greece and the United States. Major members of the alliance that do not include France (1.78 percent), Turkey (1.56), Germany (1.19), Italy (1.11) and Canada (.99), according to NATO figures. Others have pledged to do so but not until 2024.

[Flynn departure erupts into a full-blown crisis for the Trump White House]

Mattis said Washington needs the help of other nations already spending 2 percent to urge the others to do so. Those already with a plan to boost spending must accelerate it, and countries without one must establish one soon, he said.

The remarks come as NATO nations confront how to handle Russia following its 2014 annexation of Ukraines Crimean Peninsula and U.S. intelligence assessments that Russia hacked Democratic Party officials during the presidential campaign last year. Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, resigned under pressure Monday night as Trumps national security adviser after revelations that he misled Vice President Pence about secret communications with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, regarding sanctions imposed by the Obama administration in response to the alleged hacking.

[In first under Trump, Russian jets buzzed a U.S. destroyer at close range]

Fellow ministers, when the Cold War ended, we all had hopes, Mattis said. The year 2014 awakened us to a new reality: Russia used force to alter the borders of one of its sovereign neighbors, and on Turkeys border [the Islamic State] emerged and introduced a ruthless breed of terror, intent on seizing territory and establishing a caliphate. While these events have unfolded before our eyes, some in this alliance have looked away in denial of what was happening.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg sought to downplay any suggestion that Mattiss message constituted a threat, saying that the United States was simply pressing its allies to live up to their own commitments.

This is not the U.S. telling Europe to increase defense spending, Stoltenberg said at a news conference after the tough meeting. This is 28 allies, heads of state, that all were sitting around the same table in 2014, and looking into each others eyes and agreeing that we shall increase defense spending.

I welcome all pressure, all support to make sure that happens, Stoltenberg said, adding that Lithuania and Romania have pledged to reach 2 percent soon.

Others in the room when Mattis spoke saw his message differently.

If you pardon my French, we got the message. Pay up or be pushed, one European diplomat said, using a more vulgar term for what the United States might do to its allies. If you take him literally, then the message is indeed that theres no unconditional guarantee of security any more, the diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak openly about the reaction.

But not every leader felt that the message was a major departure from longtime U.S. policy to ratchet up its allies defense spending.

Its nothing new, to be honest, Dutch Defense Minister Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert said in an interview. Mattis asked for milestones, so all of us will go home and work on them.

Public opinion in the Netherlands which currently spends 1.17 percent of its annual economic output on defense is in favor of spending increases, she said.

Public support has increased because its a rough world out there and people have noticed, she said. Europe and also the Netherlands for way too long were accustomed to peace and American leadership.

Mattiss ultimatum could have the largest effect for Germany. If it were to meet the 2 percent bar, it would boost its defense spending to about $75 billion per year, resulting in a military larger than Britains. That would bea profound shift for a country that has long had a pacifist tradition that held it back from embracing a global defense presence as greatas its economic might.

Mattiss demands were echoed by British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon, who met head-to-head with the U.S. defense chief before the main NATO conclave. Fallon said that Britain which spends the second-largest amount on defense in the alliance is proposing that countries that spend less than NATO guidelines commit to an annual defense budget increase.

An annual increase would at least demonstrate good faith, Fallon told a small group of reporters in Brussels. Fallon said that Mattis had underlined a 100 percent commitment to NATO.

Britain has generally triedto ally itself with the Trump administration as London negotiates an exit from the European Union. But British leaders have urged Trump to maintain his military commitment to NATO and to Europe.

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Pence offers ‘unwavering’ NATO pledge – York Daily Record/Sunday News

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The Associated Press 9:55 p.m. ET Feb. 18, 2017

United States Vice President Mike Pence, left, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel meet for bilateral talks during the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, Saturday, Feb. 18, 2017. The annual weekend gathering is known for providing an open and informal platform to meet in close quarters.(Photo: Matthias Schrader, AP)

MUNICH (AP) America's commitment to NATO is "unwavering," U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said Saturday, reassuring allies about the direction the Trump administration might take but leaving open questions about where Washington saw its relationship with the European Union and other international organizations.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for strengthening a range of multilateral bodies the EU, NATO and the United Nations and lauded the benefits of "a free, independent press."

In his first foreign trip as vice president, Pence sought immediately to address concerns raised by President Donald Trump's earlier comments questioning whether NATO was "obsolete."

Pence told the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of diplomats and defense officials: "I bring you this assurance: The United States of America strongly supports NATO and will be unwavering in our commitment to our trans-Atlantic alliance."

"Your struggles are our struggles. Your success is our success," Pence said. "And ultimately, we walk into the future together."

Merkel, speaking before Pence, told him and other leaders that "acting together strengthens everyone."

Her address came amid concerns among allies about the Trump administration's approach to international affairs and fears that the U.S. may have little interest in working in international forums.

"Will we be able to continue working well together, or will we all fall back into our individual roles?" Merkel asked. "Let's make the world better together and then things will get better for every single one of us."

Trump has praised Britain's decision to leave the 28-nation EU. And a leading contender to be the next U.S. ambassador to the EU, Ted Malloch, has said Washington is "somewhat critical and suspicious" of the bloc and would prefer to work with countries bilaterally.

Pence did not mention the European Union in his speech, something picked up on by French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault who wrote on Twitter: "In Munich, Vice President Pence renews America's commitment to the Atlantic alliance. But not a word on the EU."

Pence did say, however, that the U.S. was on a path of "friendship with Europe and a strong North Atlantic alliance."

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel also indicated skepticism about Pence's pledges, saying that he agreed Europe needed to work with the U.S. on the basis of common values. But in a barely veiled reference to Trump, he said "both countries must define their interests, and our foreign policies should not be driven by ideology."

"Ideologies lead to hostile concepts that might not be able to be overcome," said Gabriel, who is chairman of the Social Democratic Party, Merkel's junior coalition partner.

Going ahead, he said Europeans "should hope for the best, but prepare for the worst."

In pledging the Trump administration's support for NATO, Pence said the U.S. expected all countries to live up to commitments to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product spending into defense.

"Europe's defense requires your commitment as much as ours," he said.

Merkel reiterated that Germany is committed to the 2 percent goal though Germany currently only contributes about 1.3 percent.

"We will do everything we can in order to fulfill this commitment," she said. "But let me add, however, that I believe while NATO is very much in the European interest, it's also in the American interest it's a very strong alliance where we are united together."

Gabriel suggested that development aid and humanitarian moves such as in Germany's decision to take in nearly 900,000 refugees last year should also be part of the consideration when looking at defense spending.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told The Associated Press, however, that both things were necessary.

"We need a comprehensive approach and of course development aid and funding for refugees is also very important," he said. "But there's no contradiction between being focused on development aid and security actually the only way we can create development is to preserve the peace. We need security to be able to facilitate economic development."

Merkel, who met with Pence one-on-one following their speeches, acknowledged that Europeans couldn't fight global issues like Islamic extremist terrorism alone.

"We need the military power of the United States," she said.

She renewed a call for Islamic religious authorities to speak "clear words on the demarcation of peaceful Islam and terrorism in the name of Islam."

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told the security conference that Trump is working on a "streamlined" version of his executive order banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim nations to iron out the difficulties that landed his first order in the courts.

Kelly said next time Trump will "make sure that there's no one caught in the system of moving from overseas to our airports" during the travel ban.

The nations affected by the original ban were Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Kelly mentioned "seven nations" again on Saturday, leading to speculation they will all be included in Trump's next executive order on immigration.

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Russia ‘plotted to kill Montenegro’s PM and overthrow government to stop country joining Nato’ – The Independent

Posted: at 10:57 am

Russia was behind a plot to kill Montenegros pro-Western formerprime minister to stop the country from joining Nato, senior British government officials have claimed.

Senior government sources told TheSunday Telegraphthe alleged plot to kill MiloDjukanovichad been constructed in such a way that it could be blamed on rogue Russian nationalists if uncovered.

In November, a special prosecutor in the former Yugoslav republic said a group of Russian nationalistshad planned to assassinate Mr Djukanovic to get an opposition party into power.

Moscow has denied any involvement in the plot, and Montenegrin opposition parties have said it was fabricated and accuse Mr Djukanovic of using the security services to extend his quarter century of dominance.

Michael Flynn resigns as national security adviser over Russia row

However, the newspaper reports the alleged plot was foiled hours before it was due to take place on 16 October, on the eve of the nation joining Nato.

Moscow has repeatedly warned Montenegro to ditch its plans to join Nato. If Montenegro joined the Western military alliance, Russia would lose strategic access to the Adriatic Sea and Serbia would remain its only ally in the region.

You are talking about a plot to disrupt or take over a government in some way. You cant imagine that there wasnt some kind of approval process,anunnamed source is quoted as saying.

Two Russian intelligence officers reportedly spent months recruiting and equipping a small force of Serbian nationalists to attack the parliament building.

The alleged plot would have seen the attackers, disguised as police, open fire on a crowd of opposition party supporters as the election results were announced.

In the resulting confusion, other conspirators planned to force their way into the parliament building and kill the Prime Minister.

Such a massacre could have tipped the country into civil war and derailed any hopes it had of joining Nato and, later, the EU.

The Montenegrin police reportedly arrested more than 20 people on the eve of the election, including a former commander of Serbias special forces, while Serbian authorities detained others across the border.

After winning the parliamentary elections, Mr Dukanovic announced he would resign as Prime Minister and his deputy Dusko Markovicwould take over the role and form the new government.

The newspaper said Britain and the United Statesintelligence agencies had gathered evidence of high-level Russian involvement in the plot.

When asked about the newspaper report, Britains foreign ministry said Montenegro had identified Russian nationalists as behind the plot.

Montenegro must itself deliver a competent, transparent judicial process and trial of the coup suspects,a foreign ministry spokeswoman said.

Success would be a major step in convincing the international community of real progress in Montenegrin rule of law reform and compatibility with Nato and EU standards,she added.

The director general of MI5, Andrew Parker, said in November that Russiawas pushing its foreign policy in increasingly aggressive ways including cyber-attacks and espionage, posing a growing threat to Britain and the rest of Europe.

Moscow has denied this, and has challenged Britain to produce hard evidence.

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EU leaders defiant over US pressure to increase Nato defence budgets – The Independent

Posted: at 10:57 am

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has ruled out increasing Nato defence spending less than a week after the Trump administration issued an ultimatum to members.

Ms Merkel said Germany would honour its long-standing commitment to increase defence budgets by 2024 but would not accelerate its plans.

It came as European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker urged Europe's leaders to resist US pressure to increase European defence spending.

Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Nato members in Europe to increase their defence spend, and his defence secretary James Mattis said the US would be ready to "moderate its commitment" to the alliance if other members did not pay their fair share.

Nato guidelines call for all 28 members of the collective defence alliance to spend two per cent of GDP on military budgets.

However, only five of those members do so in reality America, Britain, Greece, Estonia and Poland.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, General Mattis warned of an "arc of instability" on Europe's periphery and called on Nato allies to contribute more.

"We all see our community of nations under threat on multiple fronts as the arc of instability builds on Nato's periphery and beyond," he said.

However, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Europe should not allow itself to be "pushed into this."

It has been the American message for many, many years, he said. I am very much against letting ourselves be pushed into this.

Mr Juncker argued the EUs development and humanitarian aid spending made up for any shortfalls in military financing, and echoed Ms Merkels sentiments that development and crisis prevention had to be areas of focus.

If you look at what Europe is doing in defence, plus development aid, plus humanitarian aid, the comparison with the United States looks rather different. Modern politics cannot just be about raising defence spending, he said.

"Europeans must bundle their defence spending better and spend the money more efficiently.

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