Displaying posts published in

August 2019

Melissa Langsam Braunstein: Europe Considers The Nazi Idea Of Requiring Jewish Businesses To Identify Themselves On Labels

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/europe-considers-nazi-idea-requiring-jewish-businesses-identify-labels/

The EU may begin targeting businesses in Israel in the name of neutrality, but the ramifications will be anything but neutral.

Europeans are considering stigmatizing Jewish businesses — an idea last popularized by the Nazis — all in the name of neutrality. This time, the focus is on Jewish-owned businesses located in the world’s only Jewish nation state and the European Union’s not-so-subtle suggestion that Israel exists only within its pre-1967 borders.

In June, Gerard Hogan, an advocate general at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, issued a nonbinding opinion, which many expect the court’s judges will adopt, suggesting that EU member states marginalize foodstuffs from Israel through detailed labeling. So products produced by Jewish citizens of Israel on land Israel won in the Six Day War is supposed to be labeled as hailing from “Israeli settlements” rather than being labeled “made in Israel.”

The advocate general writes that it’s not acceptable to simply mark a product as being from the West Bank or the Golan: “Although these terms do refer to the wider area or territory from which the product originates, the omission of the additional geographical information that the product originates from Israeli settlements is likely to mislead the consumer as to the true origin of the product. In such cases, it is necessary to add, in brackets, the term ‘Israeli settlement’ or equivalent terms.”

Joy Pullmann:Scholastic’s New School Catalog Hawks Books To Saturate Kids With Identity Politics

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/scholastics-new-school-catalog-hawks-books-to-indoctrinate-kids-with-identity-politics/

The world’s largest publisher and distributor of books to kids, which hosts the No. 1-visited site for U.S. elementary school teachers, has gone full-on woke. You won’t believe the garbage they’re selling to public schools.

This year’s back to school catalog for grades three to six from Scholastic, a children’s publishing giant, features books selected through a partnership with the identity politics pressure group We Need Diverse Books. The results are about what you might imagine.

The catalog’s front page features books about a Pakistani-American girl whose Milwaukee mosque is vandalized in a “hate crime,” a girl who finds out “her dad is secretly dating her best friend’s mom,” and a book about “Native American Heroes” who of course include political activists. Delightful. Third through sixth graders — who are approximately ages eight to twelve — definitely need this kind of broadening of their childish perspectives.

Howard Zinn’s Anti-American Propaganda Takes Over The Smithsonian By Mary Grabar

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/howard-zinns-anti-american-propaganda-takes-smithsonian/

Teach-ins’ at the taxpayer-funded Smithsonian and in New York City promise anti-historical indoctrination from socialist Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States.’

Long ago, during my childhood, school began right after Labor Day, and Columbus Day, commemorating the date Christopher Columbus discovered the New World on Oct. 12, 1492, was the first holiday of the school year.

Not anymore. Columbus Day of late has been marked by defacement of statues and hordes of angry adolescents demanding an end to the holiday. Leading young people in the hate-fest are teachers who have been educated with Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”

This semester, the Smithsonian Institution is helping. Teachers will learn new teaching strategies and receiving continuing education credits at two “teach-ins” — on Sept. 7 in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and on Sept. 28 in New York City.

Both “teach-ins” are efforts of our national museum, the Smithsonian, and D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice, “a project of Teaching for Change.” The invitation promises to feature “classroom resources for K-12 from Native Knowledge 360 [Degrees]” and from “the Zinn Education Project, including the campaign to abolish Columbus Day.”

The Zinn Education Project’s Infiltration

Facebook Audit Results Rile Liberals And Conservatives By Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/facebook-audit-results-rile-liberals-and-conservatives/

Results of a Facebook audit released Tuesday, finding that the social media company has “significant work” to do to satisfy concerns from conservatives, are drawing criticism from both liberals and conservatives alike.

The eight-page report, authored by former Sen. Jon Kyl with Covington law firm in consultation with 133 conservative organizations, was inconclusive on whether the platform was biased in suppressing conservative views. The report, however, was written in a manner aiming to ease criticism of the company from Republicans and President Donald Trump, who often charge that the tech giant is part of a greater movement among large tech companies in Silicon Valley stifling conservative ideas on the internet.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has been the leading Republican senator pushing for greater federal regulation of big tech, slammed the report as a “smokescreen disguised as a solution.”

Hawley proposed legislation in June stripping social media companies such as Facebook of liability protections granted under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act unless they consented to an external audit to prove political neutrality.

The Missouri senator argued the Kyl and Covington audit was whitewash and far from thorough, as the report was essentially a compilation of interviews. “Merely asking somebody to listen to conservatives’ concerns isn’t an audit,” Hawley said.

“Facebook should conduct an actual audit by giving a trusted third party access to its algorithm, its key documents, and its content moderation protocols,” Hawley said in a statement Tuesday. “Then Facebook should release its results to the public.”

Other conservatives have been critical of Kyl’s report.

Brent Bozell, the president of Media Research Center, a conservative nonprofit dedicated to exposing bias in the media, claimed the Facebook report released this week was “empty and insulting.”

CNN’s Wajahat Ali: White Supremacists Are “Coming For All Of Us,” Trump “Will Not Win” Posted By Ian Schwartz VIDEO

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/08/20/cnns_wajahat_ali_white_supremacists_are_coming_for_all_of_us_trump_will_not_win.html

CNN contributor Wajahat Ali is asked what if “the squad” — the four Congresswomen led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — used the same “anti-Semitic trope” that President Trump did Tuesday when he said Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats are disloyal. Ali, a Muslim, said Muslims are with Jews and they will not be divided by race or religion.

“So, what I’m telling everyone today is a very radical idea that Donald Trump is a racist president. He’s also an anti-Semitic president. He promotes white supremacist talking points,” Ali said Tuesday on ‘CNN Tonight’ with host Don Lemon.”We’re going unite, we’re going to have our disagreements about Israel,” Ali said of his newfound Jewish-Muslim brotherhood. “That’s fine. But we’re going to unite against the common threat that is coming against all of us which is white supremacy and Donald Trump, you will not win.”

Too Old Or Too Left: 2020 Democrats Are Unelectable — Written by Thomas McArdle

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/21/trump-

Gaffe-prone Joe Biden – despite his current healthy lead in the polls – is, at 76 years of age, sure to have his ability to function as president questioned harshly by the younger Democratic candidates. His rivals may not have attacked him yet on age, but they’re stalking their prey, waiting for an opportune moment to strike.

Frankly, it is near to impossible to imagine that Barack Obama’s vice president can escape age concerns for the next 14-and-a-half months of grueling campaigning, through the snows of New Hampshire, a 14-state Super Tuesday less than a month later, and nearly a dozen televised debates between now and next spring, when the nominee will likely become clear.

Should he manage to pull it off, even voters who dislike President Donald Trump are likely to prefer the 74-year-old devil whose presidency they know to the slightly older devil whose presidency might have to be run by those around him — appointees certain to be significantly to Biden’s left. And even a softening Trump economy is going to look and feel pretty good to voters in November of next year.

Should Biden not get the nomination — a more likely outcome — it will be Trump vs. some species or other of out-and-out socialist, scampering to the center as soon as the nomination is tied up, yet trying to keep energized a Democratic grassroots so radicalized it now considers Obamacare too tame.

Column: Robert Mueller crushed their dreams, so Democrats pivot to race By John Kass

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/john-kass/ct-democrats-race-kass-20190821-vszdak3hkzfazhjaxltdik3cki-story.html

What was the embittered left — Democratic presidential candidates and their media allies — supposed to do when their hopes of Russia-Trump collusion crashed on the boulevard of broken dreams?

Pivot.

They had invested so much in their fantasy that President Donald Trump was a treasonous agent of Russian boss Vladimir Putin. But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report came out, and there was no collusion, no crime charged, their fantasy collapsed.

And so, after a brief spasm of despair, the left pivoted to their default position: race.

Race. Race. Race. Race. Race.

With Americans working and with money in their pockets again, with the 2020 election approaching, Democrats are reaching for the race card the way a sick man reaches for the waters of Lourdes. Desperately. Their allies in media followed suit, with Trump called everything from a white supremacist, to a Nazi, and on and on.

Meanwhile, the New York Times embarks on an ambitious new series, the 1619 Project — marking the 400th anniversary of the first slave ships to our shores.

The newspaper said it hopes “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”

NYT editor Dean Baquet, a former colleague of mine at the Chicago Tribune, a thoughtful man now with his newsroom in turmoil, expressed the pivot in a different way.

Netanyahu’s carrot-and-stick policy on Gaza Both left and right are uneasy about growing violence from the border, but the prime minister has a plan. Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/netanyahus-carrot-and-stick-policy-on-gaza/

Of all the criticism lobbed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu these days, the claim that he has been exercising restraint towards the terrorists in Gaza to distract from his legal battles and guarantee victory in the fast-approaching Sept. 17 Knesset elections is the most ridiculous. As any member of the Israeli public and political echelon is keenly aware, the one thing that should worry Netanyahu’s opponents is a war.

This is particularly true today, when Israeli residents of the Gaza-border communities—the “envelope” around the Hamas-ruled enclave—are suffering from an understandable mixture of fatigue and fury. Traumatized by living under daily threat of death and destruction with only minimal respite between rockets, riots and incendiary balloons will do that. Especially considering the fact that while Palestinian children in Gaza attend summer camps where they learn how to kill Jews, the Israeli kids on the other side of the fence spend their vacation listening for Red Alert sirens telling them to take cover in the nearest bomb shelter.

That the politicians to the right of Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party have been shouting about a lack of Israeli deterrence makes perfect sense. Though only a handful of such candidates believes in reoccupying Gaza—and the rest don’t really have a viable plan other than applying even more Israeli firepower in the ongoing battle of attrition—all of those running on right-wing tickets are telling the electorate that Netanyahu, whose re-election is the only shot they have at being players in the next government, needs a fierce hawkish push.

How a US Congresswoman Can Help Palestinians by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14754/tlaib-help-palestinians

While Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib is using the controversy surrounding her visit as an excuse to launch scathing attacks on Israel, Palestinians seem to be more worried about failed leaders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This concern is not something that Tlaib seems to share with Palestinians because for her the only wrong-doing is coming from Israel.

“Praising suicide bombers and pushing blood libel is not ‘criticizing Israeli policy.'” — Charles Sykes, The Bulwark, August 19, 2019.

As a Congresswoman, Tlaib should have been worried that a US Embassy was forced to cancel an event to help Palestinians because of threats and calls for a boycott.

It would have been helpful had the Palestinian-American Congresswoman made an effort to persuade Palestinian Authority officials to resume their relations with the US administration and explore ways of boosting the Palestinian economy and improving living conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As a Congresswoman, she should be working to build, and not destroy, bridges between her people and the US. Her fierce attacks on Israel and the US administration, however, embolden Palestinian hardliners and fuel hate against Israelis and Americans.

If Tlaib really cared about the Palestinians, she should be campaigning against the PA and Hamas leaders engaged in a power struggle over money and power. Moreover, she should be calling for reforms and democracy under the PA and Hamas. The least she could do is demand an end to human rights violations by the PA and Hamas or demand that they hold long overdue presidential and parliamentary elections. She could also demand an end to crackdown on freedom of speech under the PA and Hamas.

Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib is apparently upset because she was not able to agitate against Israel during a proposed visit to her grandmother there.

What the grievance brigade misunderstands about America By Heather Mac Donald,

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/458175-what-the-grievance-brigade-misunderstands-about-america

The ongoing crusade against America’s civic rituals and founding values picked up pace this summer.

The city council of St. Louis Park, Minn., stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before its meetings, lest immigrants feel “uncomfortable.” Nike junked a commemorative Fourth of July shoe with an embroidered Revolutionary War flag on its heel because the flag could “offend and detract” from the national holiday. The Charlottesville, Va., city council scrapped the city holiday celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. The San Francisco School Board voted to cover up a mural of George Washington. Colorado State University recommended against using “America” or “American” to refer to the United States and its citizens since those words “erase” other cultures in the Western hemisphere.

Previously, monuments to American history have been shrouded, vandalized and removed; patriotic ceremonies have been cancelled or renamed. A former San Francisco school board president, now a city supervisor, encouraged schools honoring Washington, James Monroe, Jefferson, and Francis Scott Key to rechristen themselves, because those historical figures “are not relevant or meaningful or inspire pride.” A statue of Abraham Lincoln at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been targeted repeatedly for removal because, as one protester from an indigenous student group explained: “Let’s be real. He owned slaves . . .and ordered the execution of Native men.” 

These erasures are done in the name of fighting patriarchy, racism, genocide and colonialism. At the next outbreak of iconoclastic zeal, two questions should be posed to the purifiers:

Compared to what?