TONIGHT AND TOMORROW ARE YOM KIPPUR AND THERE WILL BE NO POSTING UNTIL TUESDAY MORNING.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/09/27/uae-irans-aggressive-policies-made-arabs-look-at-israel/
“The more strategic the Israelis look at these relationships, the more doors will open to them,” says UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash. Normalizing ties with Israel “was strategically good for the UAE, will make it have more of a global presence.”
The United Arab Emirates didn’t need peace with Israel to counter Iran, a top UAE official said Friday, but he said Iran’s aggressive policies over three decades alarmed many Arab countries and made them look at their relationship with Israel “with fresh eyes.”
UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash acknowledged at a virtual briefing on the sidelines of the equally virtual UN General Assembly’s annual meeting of world leaders that this may not have been Iran’s intention. But its actions had an impact in the region, he said, though he wouldn’t speculate on whether other Arab countries would follow the UAE and Bahrain in establishing relations with Israel.
“The only thing I want to say is the more strategic the Israelis look at these relationships, the more doors will open to them,” Gargash said. “If they look at it very `transactionally’, I think that it is not going to send a very good omen for normalizing relations with many of the Arab countries.”
Gargash said the UAE’s message to Israel is to “look at these opportunities and build strategically, and think long term rather than short term” – and prove wrong the countries who say that because of the Israeli political system its decision-makers think only tactically.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16550/france-terrorism-silence
This brand of extremism has also managed to transform many European citizens into prisoners, people hiding in their own countries, sentenced to death and forced to live in houses unknown even to their friends and families. And we got used to it!
“[T]his lack of courage to follow in Charlie’s footsteps comes at a price, we are losing freedom of speech and an insidious form of self-censorship is gaining ground.” — Flemming Rose, Le Point, September 2, 2020.
“To put it simply, freedom of speech is in bad shape around the world. Including in Denmark, France and throughout the West. These are troubled times; people prefer order and security to freedom.” — Flemming Rose, Le Point, August 15, 2020.
On September 25, in Paris, two people were stabbed and seriously wounded outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo, where 12 of the satirical magazine’s editors and cartoonists were murdered by extremist Muslims in 2015. The suspect, in police custody, is being investigated for terrorism.
The accused murderers in the 2015 attacks are currently on trial in Paris.
Shortly before the knifing attack, on September 22, Charlie Hebdo’s director of human resources, Marika Bret, did not come home. In fact, she no longer has a home. She was evicted after serious and concrete death threats from extremist Muslims. She decided to make her “exfiltration” public for French intelligence to alert the public to the threat of extremism in France.
“I have lived under police protection for almost five years”, she told the weekly Le Point.
“My security agents received specific and detailed threats. I had ten minutes to pack and leave the house. Ten minutes to give up a part of one’s life is a bit short and it was very violent. I will not go home. I am losing my home to outbursts of hatred, the hatred that always begins with the threat of instilling fear. We know how it can end”.
Bret also claimed that the French Left abandoned the “battle for secularism”.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16552/egypt-christians-abduction-rape
“One of the strategies they used to gain the girls’ trust was for the kidnapper, a Muslim man, to tell the Christian girl he loved her and wanted to convert to Christianity for her. They would start a romantic relationship until, one day, they would decide to ‘escape’ together. What the girls do not know is that they are actually being kidnapped.” — Former Egyptian human trafficker, World Watch Monitor, October 5, 2017.
“The kidnappers receive large amounts of money. Police can help them in different ways, and when they do, they might also receive a part of the financial reward the kidnappers are paid…. In some cases, police provide the kidnappers with drugs they seize.” — Former Egyptian trafficker, World Watch Monitor, October 5, 2017
“If all goes to plan, the girls are also forced into marriage with a strict Muslim. Their husbands don’t love them, they just marry her to make her a Muslim. She will be hit and humiliated. And if she tries to escape, or convert back to her original religion, she will be killed.” — Former Egyptian trafficker, World Watch Monitor, October 5, 2017.
“There are countless families who report that police have either been complicit in the kidnapping or at the very least bribed into silence. If there is any hope for Coptic women in Egypt to have a merely ‘primitive’ level of equality, these incidents of trafficking must cease, and the perpetrators must be held accountable by the judiciary.” — From “‘Jihad of the Womb’: Trafficking of Coptic Women & Girls in Egypt,” a report by Coptic Solidarity.
The kidnapping, sexual abuse and forced conversion of Christian women and girls in Egypt — a “particularly vulnerable group to exploitation” that is quietly living an “unimaginable nightmare” — is rampant, with no signs of easing up. This is the finding of a report published on September 10, 2020 by Coptic Solidarity, an international organization based in Washington D.C., that works to promote equal citizenship rights for Egypt’s Christian minority.
In its 15-page report, “‘Jihad of the Womb’: Trafficking of Coptic Women & Girls in Egypt,” Coptic Solidarity documents “the widespread practice of abduction and trafficking” and estimates that there have been “about 500 cases within the last decade, where elements of coercion were used that amount to trafficking,” according to the UN’s own definitions, particularly per its “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children.”
According to Coptic Solidarity:
“The capture and disappearance of Coptic women and minor girls is a bane of the Coptic community in Egypt, yet little has been done to address this scourge by the Egyptian or foreign governments, NGOs, or international bodies. According to a priest in the Minya Governorate, at least 15 girls go missing every year in his area alone. His own daughter was nearly kidnapped had he not been able to intervene in time.”
The report offers 13 separate case studies. Victims range from teenage girls, to newlywed and pregnant young women, to married women with children. Most of the victims disappeared in one of two ways: either they were publicly kidnapped, often by being forced into a car while traveling to school, church, or work; or — especially true for teenage girls — they were lured into relationships with young Muslim men who promised them the world, until, that is, they realized they had been duped. According to a former Egyptian human trafficker:
“[O]ne of the strategies they used to gain the girls’ trust was for the kidnapper, a Muslim man, to tell the Christian girl he loved her and wanted to convert to Christianity for her. They would start a romantic relationship until, one day, they would decide to ‘escape’ together. What the girls do not know is that they are actually being kidnapped. Most of the time they will not marry their kidnapper, but someone else.”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16551/cfr-javad-zarif
The tweet contains interesting indicators to how [the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard] Haas tries to dodge the issue. He presents Afkari’s killing as a judicial “execution”, enabling Zarif to say “well, you have executions in some states of the US as well.”
In November 1938, a few days after Kristallnacht, the French ambassador to Berlin Robert Coulondre reported the event to Paris, describing the savagery in the heart of Europe, concluding that “nevertheless [néanmoins in French] one should understand German grievances against the Jews.”
[I]n his expose at the CFR meeting, Zarif repeated the same claims, not to say lies, that he has been dishing out to the illustrious audience for years. And it seems that they gobbled it up with the same appetite as before. To hoodwink his audience, Zarif never used the term “Islamic Republic” and pretended that “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei doesn’t exist. Nor did he talk of Islam and Tehran’s strategy to “export the Islamic Revolution” to the whole world, including New York where the CFR is located.
Portrayed by Zarif, the Khomeinist regime is a peace-and-love enterprise where the judiciary is independent, all freedoms are respected, and the strategic aim is to establish peace and harmony across the globe. There are no political prisoners in Iran. Tehran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas is cultural and the Iranian presence in Syria is only advisory, at the invitation of the Syrian government. There are, of course, no American and other foreign hostages in Iran. If there is trouble in the Middle East it is the fault of the United States. OK, not of good Americans like John Kerry and Barack Obama but of people like Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.
For the past few years, hosting the Islamic Republic’s Foreign Minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif, has developed into an annual ritual of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). This year, however, CFR’s invitation to Zarif raised a storm of protest beyond the bubble in which American foreign policy junkies play games, indulge in fantasies, and address their principal task, which is fund-raising.
Tonight, at sundown Yom Kippur the holiest day known as the Day of Atonement begins for the Jewish people. It is a somber Holiday which I observe with memories, reflection, regrets and appreciation for the good things in life.
Regrets? My deepest regret is the state of liberal Jews today. In kindness- it is after all a day of repentance for harsh treatment of others- I could say that they are Utopians who really want a better world.
When does Utopia collide with reality and facts? When does exculpating riots, looting and violence against innocent people meld with social justice? How long will they tolerate an assault on American legacy and culture?
How do people who toast “L’chaim”- to life -become so obsessed with abortion including late term abortion that it becomes a key consideration in elections?
Why have so many people of my faith attached their passionate support to a party which ignores and condones vile anti-Semitism?
Why do they revile Benjamin Netanyahu but demand a hearing for criminals, bigots and abettors of terror?
Will they atone? Maybe for polluting and their “inner racism” of self-preservation. Alas.
On an optimistic note, we have survived as a faith and people for 5781 years while mighty nations and empires have crumbled. May we continue to do so and in the New Year may the Lord guard the safety and success of America and Israel. rsk
https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/26/barrett-will-sail/
As I write, President Trump has just confirmed what the rumor mill has been disgorging with increasing confidence over the last few days: Judge Amy Coney Barrett is his pick to replace the feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died at 87 a little over a week ago, as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The wheels of government tend to turn slowly, but Donald Trump has once again demonstrated that if need be, they can be made to turn with dizzying speed.
He did it last spring when he mobilized the awesome resources of American business to produce a mountain of medical materiel in record time to meet the emergency sparked by the Chinese virus.
And he just did it again by nominating Judge Barrett to meet the political emergency threatened by anti-democratic forces massing to upset the 2020 election.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has already announced that Barrett’s confirmation hearings will begin October 12. With the Republicans holding a 53-47 majority, and with no more than two likely defections (at most), she is likely to be seated before the election on November 3. It is imperative that the Supreme Court, which may be called to rule upon various electoral anomalies, be sitting with its full complement of nine justices.
Barrett graduated first in her class from Notre Dame Law School and then held two clerkships, the second for Justice Antonin Scalia. She was in private practice briefly before returning to teach law at Notre Dame, where she still teaches. In 2017, President Trump nominated her for the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
I became aware of Judge Barrett in 2018 after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement. Her name appeared on a shortlist of candidates for Kennedy’s replacement. In the event, President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, whose disgraceful treatment during his hearings by Democratic senators and the media is still horrifying to contemplate.
Will Barrett face the same level of unhinged vituperation? I think it unlikely, though I remember a conversation I had with a well-informed legal observer in the immediate aftermath of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “Well, the public was so repelled by that spectacle that Trump’s next nomination is likely to go more smoothly,” I said.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/26/the-molotov-diploma/
This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives, September 17, 2020.
Just before Halloween in 2015, Erika Christakis, a lecturer at Yale and associate master of one of Yale’s residential colleges, sent an email advising students to “ignore or reject things that trouble you,” rather than throw fits of rage. She was referring to Halloween costumes, which had suddenly become a major issue to supposedly mature Yale students and some Yale deans who had cautioned the students to avoid culturally insensitive garb. Christakis wrote as a specialist in child development and was counseling what most of us would consider common sense.
Yet some students at Yale erupted in overwhelming fury. In a now-famous video, a mob of students surrounded Erika’s husband, Professor Nicholas Christakis, and taunted him for over 30 minutes. Shortly after that, finding themselves lacking any public support from faculty colleagues or the Yale administration, Erika and Nicholas resigned.
This incident marked a turning point in America’s campus culture. But it was not the only one. Barely a week later, Melissa Click, a professor at the University of Missouri, was caught on video summoning brute force (“We need some muscle over here!”) to prevent a student journalist from photographing a protest in which she was participating.
Across the country in colleges large and small, a new race-themed grievance movement sprang to life after the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. That movement had a shallow premise. The officer who shot Brown in self-defense, Darren Wilson, was acquitted, and the stories about Brown having surrendered (“Hands up! Don’t shoot”) were revealed as fabrications. But out of these sparse materials, a group calling itself Black Lives Matter was able to spread its narrative far and wide.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2020/09/26/the-jihad-plot-against-new-york-city-you-heard-nothing-about-n972477
“Let it be clear, I am against America. America is my enemy.”
This was written in an online chat by a man in Texas, Jaylyn Christopher Molina, who has been charged with conspiring with another American, Kristopher Sean Matthews of Elgin, South Carolina, to commit “Netflix worthy” terror attacks at Trump Tower and the New York Stock Exchange, which they thought would gain them “rock star status.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed Thursday that white supremacists were the biggest terror threat the country faced: “Within the domestic terrorism bucket, the category as a whole, racially motivated violent extremism is, I think, the biggest bucket within that larger group. And within the racially motivated violent extremist bucket, people subscribing to some kind of white supremacist-type ideology is certainly the biggest chunk of that.”
With antifa and Black Lives Matter burning down city after city and threatening and intimidating Americans on an increasingly frequent basis, while white supremacist terror has been conspicuously absent, Wray’s assessment was curious in the extreme and ignored not just the obvious threat from the Left, but the ongoing terror threat from the stalwart allies of antifa and BLM: Islamic jihadists.
After all, antifa and Black Lives Matter would do nothing but applaud the desire of Matthews and Molina to “hit government centers.” They could have been antifa operatives when they talked of hitting the headquarters of the CIA, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Molina wrote: “We need to stick together, we need to defeat them, we need to take a lot of casualties, a lot of numbers.” Matthews stated: “I would hit places like that to send a message.” Would an antifa member have stood up and told them that they must not talk that way, but stick to peaceful protest?
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/medias_wuhan_lies_lengthen_deepen.html
Because they’ve made a god of government, there’s seemingly always another low to which liberals will stoop in order to help slow, sleepy Joe defeat Donald Trump in November. Many of these lows involve the numerous nefarious reactions to the Wuhan virus. Make no mistake about it: we have suffered an unprecedented loss of jobs and businesses, the shutdown of schools, entertainment, and hospitals; the mandating of masks and “social distancing”; and the like, not because of a global pandemic, but because of our foolish and unprecedented reaction to a global pandemic.
In other words, much of what was “unprecedented” in the fight against the Wuhan virus was simply unnecessary. As Tim Black at Spiked recently put it, because of what leftism has wrought worldwide, we have turned a pandemic into an apocalypse. Mr. Black writes:
To varying degrees, political elites, screamed on by the media, have responded to the threat posed by this virus as if it is world-ending. As if it demands the complete reorganisation of social and economic life around the supreme principle of safety. As if there is no way back. They treat it not as a nasty virus that poses a significant but manageable health risk to certain sections of the populace. No, they treat it as a god-like judgement on the old structures of social life, now deemed, in the jargon of the day, unsafe and unsustainable.
This is what is unprecedented. Not the novel virus itself. But the panicked, fear-laden and, in some quarters, gleefully apocalyptic response.
Because viruses are simply going to virus — not at all unprecedented — in order to keep the fear and the panic high, American leftists in politics, academia, and the media must regularly lie. This is especially the case as the lockdowns drag on and as the actual evidence contradicts what those who have a vested interest in keeping the Wuhan virus fear level high and the lockdowns in place are telling us.
Probably the most repeated lie in this evil episode is the near-endless reporting on Wuhan virus “case counts.” As has been noted multiple times, these reports are filled with numerous deceptions. The drive-by media in my home state of Georgia again provide a clear example.
