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April 2020

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Steele Dossier Disinformation Update New evidence that the FBI was duped by Russian intelligence.

By on April 15th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/steele-dossier-disinformation-update-11586897258?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Russia interfered in America’s 2016 election, as several government reports have established. The latest disturbing news is that Russia may have received an assist from no less than the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

That’s the takeaway of newly released portions of last year’s Department of Justice Inspector General report about the FBI’s investigation into Trump-Russia collusion. That report showed how the FBI abused its powers by misleading a secret court into granting surveillance warrants on the Trump campaign. Thanks to Congressional pressure, the Justice Department has now declassified footnotes showing that the FBI’s main source for its collusion allegations—Christopher Steele—may have been targeted as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The FBI was warned of this threat but ignored it.

Mr. Steele was tasked by contractors for the Hillary Clinton campaign in spring 2016 with assembling a summary of Trump-Russia allegations. This document, which became known as the Steele dossier, was fed to the FBI and became the central evidence in its applications for warrants against Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The FBI should have been wary of Mr. Steele’s reporting, having been warned he was connected to the rival campaign.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

‘Well Worth Saving’ Review: Displaced Academics In the 1930s and ’40s, American universities made life-and-death decisions about which European Jews to give faculty appointments. By Martin Peretz

By on April 15th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-worth-saving-review-displaced-academics-11586905987?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

Five of the eight Ivy League universities are now led by self-identifying Jews: Harvard’s president is an observant Jew, sometimes Hillel, sometimes Chabad; Yale’s, a descendant of possibly the most learned rabbinical dynasty; Penn’s, the daughter of a German Orthodox Jew who escaped to America before the carnage; Brown’s, a Quaker convert to Judaism; Princeton’s, a former Catholic who learned as an adult of his German refugee mother’s Jewishness. The overtness, even the ubiquity, of these varied Jewish identities reflects a dramatic 75-year evolution in the status of Jews in American academia. And this shift intertwines with and reflects something broader still: a sea change in the texture of American academic life, a change that has brought with it new challenges to the academy’s current relevance.

Laurel Leff has written a sober and fair—but devastating—volume documenting the story’s start, without which its arc is difficult to grasp: the tragedy of hundreds of Jewish scholars and their kin who perished in Hitler’s death camps, in the ghettoes and in the streets, for want of a piece of paper inviting them to an American campus. The book’s title, “Well Worth Saving,” is an unfortunate phrase of the period that was often used to describe these scholars—even by the American philosopher and humanitarian activist Horace Kallen (1882-1974), a Prussian-Polish Jewish émigré who, among other like-minded academics in the 1930s and ’40s, helped to save some of them. In 1919, Kallen had been a founder of the New School for Social Research. He had also, five years earlier, helped to found the New Republic, a magazine of opinion that started life championing Louis Brandeis’s Supreme Court nomination against old-line Protestant opposition. As his history suggests, Kallen found no theoretical obstacle to a deep national character with particularistic threads enriching it.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Concern Grows in Germany Over Antisemitic Propaganda Tied to Coronavirus Pandemic

By on April 14th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/04/13/concern-grows-in-germany-over-antisemitic-propaganda-tied-to-coronavirus-pandemic/

A prominent psychologist in Berlin who deals with extremist groups has expressed fear that the coronavirus pandemic will encourage a further wave of antisemitism in Germany.

“An attempt is being made to spread the image of an enemy that people are already familiar with,” psychologist Ahmad Mansour told the Tagesschau news outlet over the weekend, when asked about a rash of antisemitic images associating Jews with the virus.

Mansour — an Israeli Arab and former Islamist who now works on counter-extremism programs in the German Muslim community — observed that the “images are very popular and widespread, online and offline.”

One image being shared by antisemitic agitators depicts crudely-stereotyped Jews smuggling the virus into a city in a Trojan Horse, along with an accompanying text railing against the “devious Jewish Orthodox Freemason sect, aka Zionists.”

Mansour warned that antisemitic messages increasingly urged violence against Jews.

“I don’t just see conspiracy theories,” he said. “I see incitement, calls for injuries to Jews.”

German government officials monitoring extremist activity quoted in the same article concurred that the danger was growing.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Locked-Down Tel Avivians Dance on Balconies to Celebrate City’s Birthday

By on April 14th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/04/14/locked-down-tel-avivians-dance-on-balconies-to-celebrate-citys-birthday/

Tel Aviv celebrated its 111th birthday on Tuesday, amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis that has ground the city to a halt.

“To mark the festive occasion our truck set off to roam the city blasting the city’s unofficial anthem (Tel Aviv Ya Habibi Tel Aviv!) as residents waved from their balconies,” the Tel Aviv municipality tweeted.

Tel Aviv is celebrating it’s 111th birthday today!

To mark the festive occasion our truck set off to roam the city blasting the city’s unofficial anthem (Tel Aviv Ya Habibi Tel Aviv!) as residents waved from their balconies

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum: Corona curfew, coalition deadline Apparently, the two sides are close to resolving the dispute. We’ll believe it when we see it.

By on April 14th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/corona-curfew-coalition-deadline/

As the clock was ticking on Monday evening towards his midnight deadline to form a government, Blue and White Party leader and temporary Knesset Speaker Benny Gantz addressed the Israeli people.

Ostensibly explaining to the public why a national-emergency coalition was imperative at this time, he behaved more like someone running for election. Or defending himself to those former members of his bloc who dumped him for agreeing to make a deal with the Likud Party under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

His peculiar speech came on the heels of Netanyahu’s latest coronavirus message: that there would be a countrywide curfew during the first half of the end of the Passover holiday, from 5 p.m. on Tuesday until 5 a.m. on Wednesday—and then a resumption of the regular distancing limits about going outside.

In addition, according to the restrictions, no bakeries would be open to the public for an additional 12 hours or more. In other words, all those Israelis desperate for some fresh bread after a week of eating only matzah will have to wait another day.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

AG Barr just signaled that things are about to get ugly for the Russia collusion team By Kevin R. Brock,

By on April 14th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/492405-ag-barr-just-signaled-that-things-are-about-to-get-ugly-for-the-russia

“Travesty” is not a nice word. It usually is applied to gross perversions of justice, and that apparently is the context Attorney General William Barr desired when he dropped it into an interview answer the other day in the breezy courtyard of the Department of Justice (DOJ).

His composed, understated delivery almost disguised the weighty magnitude of that disturbing word and the loaded adjective that preceded it. “I think what happened to him,” he said, referring to the president and the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into his campaign, “was one of the greatest travesties in American history.”  

Okay, it’s important to pause for a moment and absorb what the AG said. He just called an FBI investigation not just a travesty but one of the “greatest” travesties in the nation’s history. It was an unprecedented statement by an attorney general about his own department’s premier agency.  

The FBI has made plenty of mistakes, but never in its 112-year history has an FBI investigation been characterized as a travesty, let alone one that equates to other hall-of-fame travesties in American history.

Is the AG’s assessment fair? The answer is entwined in his next statement: “Without any basis [the FBI] started this investigation into [Donald Trump’s] campaign … .”

Oops, stop again right there. Mr. Barr is making a definitive statement about that which many of us have speculated all along, namely that the weirdly unprecedented investigative team put together by former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe did not have adequate legal reasons to open a case into the Trump campaign in the first place. The attorney general just confirmed that.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who’ll decide when we can reopen? It’s not who you might think by Andrew McCarthy

By on April 14th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/492548-wholl-decide-when-we-can-reopen-its-not-who-you-might-think

President Trump is not a lawyer. No shame in that — some of our best presidents haven’t been. But he frequently gets out over his skis when he discusses constitutional law. It is a subject he sometimes mangles when speaking or tweeting, though his eventual actions tend to be respectful of the Constitution and congressional authority.

This tension is seen in a pair of tweets (here and here) that the president posted Monday morning. To wit:

“For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect. It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons. With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the Governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly!”

As a matter of constitutional law, this is wrong. The importance of the wrongness can be — and, judging from media coverage, is being — overstated. The thrust of Trump’s remarks is that the president and the governors must collaborate, and they are doing so.

Our Constitution prescribes a federalist system of divided power. Contrary to popular misconception, it is “the People,” not the federal government, that is sovereign. Furthermore, governmental power is split between federal and state officials.

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MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY:CHARACTER IS DESTINY

By on April 14th, 2020

Joseph Biden’s original and forceful response to a pandemic were he to be President.

He would: Seal the borders with China and Europe once it is established that Covid19 is a threat; seek the counsel of all national health organizations and create a team to study and advise; involve industry in producing ventilators, medical equipment, and all gear for hospital workers; engage the National Guard and the Army Corps of engineers to build hospitals and retool existing spaces to be used for patient care; advise governors and mayors to impose lockdowns, social distancing, and other mitigations; prepare a trillion dollar rescue and loan plan for those businesses that suffer severe losses due to restraint of all commerce and trade; promote all promising research and evaluation of medications and vaccines.

In spite of skepticism about his mental faculties, it is clear that he can still plagiarize, just as he did in 1987 when he ended his presidential run after revelations that he had lifted phrases from a British politician while making closing remarks at a debate. Apparently he often used quotes and phrases without attribution, and confessed to having been accused of plagiarism in law school…..rsk

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Six Feet Under by Julie Kelly

By on April 14th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/13/six-feet-under/

There will be plenty of soul searching after this crisis abates: demanding to know the scientific rationale for keeping us six feet apart when people needed each other most should be at the top of the list.

During a run over the weekend, I approached a couple walking in front of me. They appeared to be in their mid- to late-60s and had just crossed a somewhat busy 10-lane highway in southwestern Florida after shopping at a large grocery store. (They were carrying a few bags.)

But apparently my looming presence posed a lethal threat to the couple: As I came closer, the two nearly lept into a row of hedges to avoid any chance they would share air space with me for more than three seconds. They bolted in a panic as if I were wielding a flaming machete.

Here I was—an obviously healthy person jogging in the middle of the afternoon in the Florida heat and humidity—deemed a public risk simply because I would violate their personal space outside for a fleeting moment.

What in the world would prompt otherwise sane people to act so irrationally?

The explanation, of course, is the six-feet “social distancing” policy recommended by the Centers for Disease Control allegedly to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus. What initially sounded like reasonable suggestions—keep some space between yourself and someone exhibiting symptoms, don’t touch your face, stay home if you’re sick—has quickly devolved into a nearly comical world where people dive off sidewalks to avoid a momentary invasion of their six-feet perimeter from clearly healthy countrymen.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Does No One Care About These Palestinians? by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on April 14th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15861/palestinians-human-rights-syria

Those in the international community expressing concern about the possible spread of the virus in the Gaza Strip are ignoring the existing tragedy of the Palestinians in Syria, particularly those held in various Syrian government-controlled prisons.

While Palestinian Authority leaders have been urging Israel to release Palestinian prisoners in Israel out of fear they may be infected with coronavirus, these same leaders have left, without saying a word, hundreds of Palestinians held in Syrian jails.

“Such practices represent flagrant violations of international law which criminalizes all forms of torture and mistreatment against civilians,” the Action Group for Palestinians of Syria (AGPS) stated.

An Arab persecuting or torturing an Arab never seems to be condemned by the international community…. The reason the world does not care about the atrocities committed against Palestinians in Syria: they cannot blame Israel for them.

Unfortunately, the Palestinians of Syria live in an Arab country. Were those Palestinians living in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, the international media, the United Nations and human rights organizations would have interrupted the daily media fare of coronavirus by shouting day and night about Israel’s purported persecution of the Palestinians.

As the world is busy combating the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, Palestinians are continuing to “disappear” in Syrian prisons — or otherwise die. Those in the international community expressing concern about the possible spread of the virus in the Gaza Strip are ignoring the existing tragedy of the Palestinians in Syria, particularly those held in various Syrian government-controlled prisons.

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