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August 2019

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Politics and the Shooters The Dayton killer was a left-winger, but don’t blame Sen. Warren.

By on August 6th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/politics-and-the-shooters-11565047588

Police in Dayton say they’re still seeking a motive for Connor Betts’ shooting spree that killed nine people, including his sister. But whatever turns up, we hope no one blames Elizabeth Warren.

We say that because the news site Heavy.com, which gained access to Betts’ Twitter account before it was taken down, reports that his politics appear to have been left of center. The shooter recently tweeted that he would “happily” vote for Senator Warren. His Twitter profile also read: “he/him/anime fan/metalhead/leftist/i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” In December last he wrote: “This is America: Guns on every corner, guns in every house, no freedom but to kill.” A month before that, he wrote: “Vote blue for gods sake.

The Dayton shooter’s leftist ravings are notable only because the media and Democratic politicians have drawn a straight line between the El Paso shooter’s anti-immigrant “manifesto” and Donald Trump and the Republican Party. After so many recent mass shootings, it is disheartening to see how quickly the issue of these two highly disturbed shooters was overwhelmed by the urge to assign political causation.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Jennifer Lopez, Lionel Richie and Bon Jovi Defy BDS

By on August 6th, 2019

With all the possible pressure, the BDS, the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, sanctions movement could not convince Jennifer Lopez, Bon Jovi and Lionel Richie to cancel their concert in Israel. Nurit Greenger

Enjoy:

1/ Lopez and family in Israel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgsXlBnFIvw

2/ Bon Jovi Shows His Love to Israel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuDmrVHBsds

3/ Lionel Richie: When they tried blocking @LionelRichie from coming to the#Israel – he blocked @codepink right back!

Haters gonna hate, and sometimes it ain’t worth your time to chat with them…

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BOOKS, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Hollywood Legend Who Mobilized the English Language on Behalf of the Jews of Europe and Israel Rick Richman

By on August 6th, 2019

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/history-ideas/2019/07/the-hollywood-legend-who-mobilized-the-english-language-on-behalf-of-the-jews-of-europe-and-israel/

Ben Hecht invented the gangster movie. He also prodded Roosevelt into saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis, and marshaled reluctant American Jews into becoming Zionists.

“In [1939], I became a Jew and looked on the world with Jewish eyes.”
—Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century

When Ben Hecht died suddenly in 1964, at the age of seventy, the New York Times carried the news on its front page. The lengthy obituary was spread across four columns on an inside page. Buried near the end was only a brief description of Hecht’s Zionism.

Hecht wrote newspaper columns, novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, essays, and books that, in many ways, defined the times in which he lived. His sketches of life in Chicago and New York were collected in two volumes. His first novel made him a national literary figure. He co-wrote the Broadway sensation, The Front Page, and became Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter, composing such classics as Scarface, Wuthering Heights, Twentieth Century, Spellbound, and Notorious. He received six Oscar nominations and won two Oscars.

In all, Hecht wrote 25 books, including several best-sellers, 250 short stories, 20 plays, and one of the great autobiographies, A Child of the Century, which Saul Bellow praised on the cover of the New York Times Book Review as “intensely interesting . . . independent, forthright, and original.” In 2011, Time magazine would place it at number 24 on its list of the 100 best nonfiction books since 1923.

Two noteworthy books on Hecht have appeared this year: a masterful study by Julien Gorbach, The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist (Purdue) and a short biography by Adina Hoffman, Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures (Yale). Both conclude that Hecht’s encounter with Zionism in the 1940s, after a lifetime of indifference to Judaism and Jewish issues, “change[d] his life and legacy” (Gorbach) and was “in the end, as important to him as almost anything” (Hoffman).

Because of that encounter, these two biographies speak not only to one man’s life and times, but to ours as well.

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ISRAEL, POLITICS Comments turned off

Presidential Candidate Marianne Williamson Pledges to Reverse Trump’s Golan Recognition

By on August 5th, 2019

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/08/04/presidential-candidate-marianne-williamson-pledges-to-reverse-trumps-golan-recognition/

Author and spiritual guru Marianne Williamson, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination next year, has pledged that, if elected, she would undo US President Donald Trump’s official recognition in March of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

“I would rescind the president’s affirmation of sovereignty of Israel over the Golan Heights,” she said in response to a questionnaire from the Council on Foreign Relations. “I understand the occupation of the Golan Heights, but only until there is a stable government in Syria with whom one can negotiate.”

Williamson, whose debate performances last month and on Tuesday caused a buzz, is one of 16 candidates who have said that they would re-enter the United States in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal if they become elected president.

Finally, Williamson, who is Jewish, is one of nine candidates who has vowed to keep the US embassy in Israel in Jerusalem. It was moved from Tel Aviv on May 14, 2018, five months after Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“The capital of Israel is Jerusalem; it is the location of their Knesset, or Parliament building, and no one disputes that,” Williamson previously told JNS. “Countries such as the United States kept their embassies in Tel Aviv as a sign of the deference to the ongoing process of negotiations—or potential for negotiations—regarding parts of Jerusalem as related to any final plan for a two-state solution.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Proposed Anti-Israel Ethnic-Studies Curriculum in California Has Jewish Community on Alert

By on August 5th, 2019

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/08/05/proposed-anti-israel-ethnic-studies-curriculum-in-california-has-jewish-community-on-alert/

Hostility towards Israel and its supporters across college campuses throughout the United States and beyond—well-documented for years—has been the focus of pro-Israel groups. Now the anti-Israel movement may be officially trickling down into the high school system of the largest state in America.

A new ethnic-studies curriculum under proposal by the California Department of Education is being widely condemned by pro-Israel and Jewish groups, California lawmakers and activists for its “blatant bias against Israel.”

“The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum is deeply troubling—not only for its shocking omission of any mention of Jewish Americans or antisemitism or its blatant anti-Israel bias and praise of BDS, but for its clear attempt to politically indoctrinate students to adopt the view that Israel and its Jewish supporters are part of ‘interlocking systems of oppression and privilege’ that must be fought with ‘direct action’ and ‘resistance,’” Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, co-founder and director of the California-based AMCHA Initiative, told JNS.

California lawmakers have begun to raise alarms over the proposed curriculum, the result of a 2016 law calling for the creation of a model ethnic-studies curriculum by the state’s board of education.

The proposed curriculum is currently going through public comment and is expected to go through revisions, followed by being approved next year by the board.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

While media were focused on mass shootings, explosive revelations about the Russia Hoax came out in a Sunday morning interview By Thomas Lifson

By on August 5th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/while_media_were_focused_on_mass_shootings_explosive_revelations_about_the_russia_hoax_were_revealed_in_a_sunday_morning_interview.html

Sunday morning, while the nation’s eyeballs were glued to El Paso and Dayton, crucial details emerged about the vile plot executed by agents of the U.S. Intelligence Community in order to carry out the Russia Hoax.  In an interview of former House member Trey Gowdy by Maria Bartiromo, we got a preview of some of the smoking guns that are contained in transcripts that remain classified — for now.

[Recall that President Trump has given Attorney General William Barr the power to declassify documents, and Barr has appointed U.S. attorney for Connecticut John Durham to investigate and prosecute crimes associated with the obtaining of the FISA warrants and other crimes.]

Maria Bartiromo has immersed herself in the details of the Russia Hoax and has used her weekly Fox News program, Sunday Morning Futures, to tease out details of information from current and former Republican congressmen who have seen documents and interviewed witnesses that the public has not yet had access to.  The picture that emerges is ugly, indeed.

Yesterday, in an interview with former House oversight committee chairman Trey Gowdy, she exposed new details — outrageous behavior by a U.S. intelligence asset — in the setting up of George Papadopoulos in order to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign and (unsuccessfully) attempt to lure him into a chargeable crime.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Shocking Ethics Report Proves Trump Was Right To Defund UN Palestinian Refugee Agency By Erielle Davidson

By on August 5th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/05/shocking-ethics-report-proves-trump-right-defund-un-palestinian-refugee-agency/

In the past decade alone, the United States poured more than $3 billion into the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, which a new report tars for corruption.

The latest allegations of corruption and abuse at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, also known as UNRWA, prove the Trump administration was right to stop spending taxpayer dollars on the organization.

According to a confidential report by the UNRWA ethics office, its top management, including Commissioner General Pierre Krahenbuhl, allegedly “engaged in sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination, and other abuses of authority.” The allegations include of an improper relationship between Krahenbuhl and his senior adviser Maria Mohammedi that resulted in a “toxic environment,” causing “frequent embarrassment.” Mohammedi allegedly was also granted a “fast-track” to promotion to a position that Krahenbuhl created.

In the past decade alone, the United States poured more than $3 billion into UNRWA. The Trump administration cut funding in 2018, a decision U.S. Special Envoy Jason Greenblatt assured was “in part due to UNRWA’s unsustainable business model and fiscal practices.” Now, Greenblatt has called for the UNRWA ethics probe to be as transparent as possible in order to ensure the organization did not improperly use U.S. tax dollars.

Established in 1950, UNRWA was created to assist Palestinian refugees following the 1948 Arab-Israeli crisis. But since its inception, it has been an ineffective and corrupt mess.

As pointed out in a report by attorney Ran Ban-Yoshafat of Kohelet Policy Forum, an organization I have been working with this past summer, the UN violated its charter to treat all categories of people equally when it established UNRWA. While the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is tasked with assisting refugee groups across the globe, UNRWA was created explicitly to support only one group of refugees: Palestinians. Thus, in creating UNRWA, the UN unfairly discriminated in favor of Palestinian refugees.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Are We Hearing About the White Supremacist in El Paso and Not the Liz Warren Supporter in Dayton? By Charlie Martin

By on August 5th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/dayton-did-something-happen-in-dayton/

It’s notoriously difficult to perform experiments on humans, especially on large groups of humans, but every so often something happens that may not be a perfect control, but still looks awfully close.

This weekend was one of those opportunities when there were two mass shootings in as many days. One was in El Paso and is all over the news and Twitter today. He was an eco-fascist inspired by the Christchurch shootings and decided the big issue was Mexicans.

I’m sure you heard about him, and you heard that he was a “white supremacist.” Repeatedly. Over and over.

The other one was in Dayton. He was — well, Heavy.com tracked down his social media, which they summarized:

He wrote on Twitter that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, “I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.” The Greene County Board of Elections lists his party as “Dem.”

Now go to Twitter or CNN or most any major news source, and you would have one hell of a time seeing any discussion of the guy in Dayton. Oh, and try to find someone denouncing Elizabeth Warren, outside the “right”.

And yeah, I’m not mentioning either one of their names. I don’t actually imagine it matters, but, you know, whatever. Their names aren’t the issue. The truth is they’re both more similar than they are different: socially isolated, mid-twenties, with a long history of violent and often self-destructive fantasies.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Valentina Sampaio Is the First Openly Trans Victoria’s Secret Model The controversial brand is finally trying to become more inclusive By Kayla Kibbe

By on August 5th, 2019

https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/news-opinion/valentina-sampaio-is-the-first-openly-trans-victorias-secret-model

After years of sticking to an outdated brand model even in the face of declining sales and threatened irrelevance, Victoria’s Secret has finally made an attempt to answer the public’s repeated calls for diversity by hiring its first transgender model, Valentina Sampaio.

The Brazilian model first sparked rumors that she had signed with the brand last week after tagging a Victoria’s Secret account in an Instagram post and using the hashtags #vspink, #campaign and #diversity. Sampaio continued to feed the rumor mill a few days later with another post, a video, featuring the hashtags #staytuned, #vspink and #diversity.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Debunking Bernard Lewis’ Negation Of Islam’s Doctrinal Antisemitism In ~ 15 Minutes

By on August 5th, 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=H_FIPO1Iv7U

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