Migrant Advocate: Build the Wall to Save Dreamers
Congress should use its lame-duck session to forge an immigration compromise, says Donald Graham at The Washington Post. He notes that President Trump this year offered “legal status for nearly 700,000 dreamers” — illegal immigrants brought to the country as children — but Dems balked at his demand to fund the border wall. But “why not pass a simple bill: an appropriation for the wall, alongside an eventual path to citizenship” for Dreamers and others living in the shadows? “This would give each party something it badly wants”: an obvious victory for GOP restrictionists and “mercy” for a group the left cares about. The bonus is that “taxes and other contributions” from the Dreamers could eventually pay for the wall.
Jewish Scribe: An Anti-Semitic Mystery
“This one seems about as straightforward as it gets,” writes Armin Rosen in Tablet. This month, a Mogadishu-born man named Mohamed Mohamed Abdi “lurked outside of a Los Angeles synagogue in a rented car and then screamed anti-Jewish invective as he tried to run down two men emerging from the sanctuary.” To most this looks like an “open-and-shut case” of anti-Semitic violence. Not so for liberal media outlets. The Los Angeles Times’ coverage included tortured language about authorities “trying to determine the motivations of the killer,” while The New York Times and The Washington Post barely noticed the incident at all and barely touched the anti-Semitism angle. Maybe that’s because the perpetrator’s background scrambles the media’s preferred narratives. “It’s a shame we’ll never get to find out why it happened.”
Foreign Desk: Theresa May’s Brexit Muddle
British Prime Minister Theresa May and the Brussels mandarins have negotiated a final agreement that is supposed to provide “a settled basis for the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union,” reports Alan Riley at The American Interest. Only, the agreement provides no such certainty. “It instead prolongs the uncertainty by kicking the can down the road and failing to resolve any of the internal British disputes on its future relationship” with Brussels. Trade is the biggest sticking point: The agreement provides for a “transition period” that “continues the application of EU law and keeps Britain in the single market” through 2020, with a potential extension through 2022. But meanwhile London will no longer have any representation in EU institutions, even as it “will be bound by EU rules.”
Activism Watch: The Identity Left Is at War With Itself
The war between the “trans movement and the radical feminist old guard” is heating up, observes Alice Lloyd in The Weekly Standard. At issue is the “devaluation of biological sex,” which transgender activists cheer and the old-school feminists lament. With governments “poised to liberalize gender identification so that anyone can change his or her legal sex at will” feminists were suddenly alarmed by threat to the “sanctity of all-female spaces.” The problem for the feminists: Transgender activists have censorious Silicon Valley on their side. Case in point: Last week Twitter banned Canadian feminist writer Meghan Murphy after “she referred to a transitioning person who goes by both Jonathan and Jessica as ‘him.’ ”
From the Right: The Other Climate Protests
French protesters continue to pour into the streets to protest climate-change issues. No, it’s not what you think: “The violent protests” are against “President Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to mitigate climate change,” writes Commentary’s Abe Greenwald. “The fact that these massive demonstrations happened at all — that they involved some 283,000 protestors — shows how little anyone really worries about climate change.” The immediate trigger was a Macron proposal to raise the diesel tax by 0.07 euros and the gasoline tax by 0.04 euros. “It turns out that people — not just Americans — care deeply about melting ice caps and rising sea levels only under specific circumstances. Namely, when they can be blamed on the greed and stupidity of their political enemies.” But when greenism cuts into their own budgets, the French won’t pay the price — and will even burn tires and beat up police officers to make the point.
— Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari