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October 2020

ISRAEL, MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Is It Possible to Curb the Extreme Bias of the BBC? By Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld

By on October 7th, 2020

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/bbc-bias-israel/

For decades, there has been a steady stream of complaints about the BBC’s anti-Israel bias. Yet other than criticize the BBC publicly, there was little anyone could do. That may have changed. In June 2020, Tim Davie became the BBC’s new director general. He wants to make the BBC’s reporting impartial. This would be a good occasion for the publication of the secret 2004 Malcolm Balen report about BBC reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Former Israeli ambassador to the UK Zvi Shtauber told me in an interview in 2005:

The BBC is a problem in itself. Over the years I had endless conversations with them. Any viewer who looks at the BBC’s information on Israel for a consistent period gets a distorted picture. It doesn’t result from a single broadcast here or there. It derives from the BBC’s method of broadcasting. When reporting from Israel, the mosque on the Temple Mount is usually shown in the background, which gives viewers the impression that Jerusalem is predominantly Muslim.

Shtauber summed up his remarks by saying it was almost a daily task for him to react to BBC distortions about Israel.

There has been a steady stream of complaints for decades about the BBC’s anti-Israel bias—more than enough to fill a book. Camera UK maintains a special monitoring site solely to focus on the BBC’s anti-Israel bias.

Here are a few recent examples. Senior BBC producer Rosie Garthwaite is working on a new documentary critical of Israeli actions in East Jerusalem. She has admitted to sharing inaccurate pro-Palestinian propaganda on social media. She deleted a false map from her personal Twitter account that greatly overstated alleged Palestinian land loss to Israel, and she has been accused of sharing other false or controversial claims about Israel on social media. Garthwaite has wrongly suggested that Gaza has only one border, and that that sole border is controlled by Israel. This is just a sampling of her anti-Israel propaganda.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Letter Calls for Withdrawal of ‘1619 Project’ Pulitzer By Stanley Kurtz

By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/letter-calls-for-withdrawal-of-1619-project-pulitzer/

An open letter released today and signed by 21 scholars and public writers calls on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.” The letter is posted at the website of the National Association of Scholars here. (I am one of the signatories.)

The letter revisits the sorry tale of the 1619 Project’s errors and distortions and invokes these in calling for the revocation of the prize. The recent revelations that The New York Times stealthily edited out the signature claim of the project—that the advent of slavery in the year 1619 constitutes our country’s “true founding”—were, however, the immediate occasion for this letter. As Phillip Magness (another signatory) has shown, Nikole Hannah-Jones has several times denied ever claiming that 1619 was our true founding, although in fact she has made this latter claim repeatedly.

These actions on the part of both the Times and Hannah-Jones are profoundly irresponsible and disturbing. How can we explain them?

Jonah Goldberg has suggested that the Times may have undertaken its stealth edits, “out of a partisan desire to deny Donald Trump and his fans a talking point.” There is some evidence in support of this suggestion.  As Wilfred McClay (another signatory) notes in Commentary Magazine, leaked transcripts of internal meetings at the Times suggest that the 1619 Project may have been part of a strategy designed to help elect a Democratic president by highlighting America’s (allegedly) endemic racism. Not long after President Trump effectively made American history a campaign issue in his Mt. Rushmore address this July, Hannah-Jones began to deny that she or the 1619 Project had ever asserted that the year 1619 was America’s “true founding,” citing the stealthily edited text of the project as evidence. (See especially the exchange with Ben Shapiro here.) The Hannah-Jones interview on CNN that helped kick off the controversy over the stealth edits took place the day after President Trump attacked the 1619 Project in his address to the White House Conference on American History. This suggests that Hannah-Jones was willing to jettison the most notable claim of her project—even to the extent of denying that she had ever made it—once that claim began to seem like a campaign liability.

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EDUCATION, MEDIA Comments turned off

Pulitzer Board Must Revoke Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Prize Peter Wood

By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/pulitzer-board-must-revoke-nikole-hannah-jones-prize

The National Association of Scholars has agreed to host this public letter to the Pulitzer Prize Board. The letter calls on the Board to rescind the prize it awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones earlier this year. I am one of the 21 signatories.  A hard copy has been mailed to the Pulitzer Committee as well as a digital copy.

—Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars

We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2020 Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.” That essay was entitled, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” But it turns out the article itself was false when written, making a large claim that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary motive for the American Revolution, a claim for which there is simply no evidence.

We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2020 Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.”

When the Board announced the prize on May 4, 2020, it praised Hannah-Jones for “a sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.” Note well the last five words. Clearly the award was meant not merely to honor this one isolated essay, but the Project as a whole, with its framing contention that the year 1619, the date when some twenty Africans arrived at Jamestown, ought to be regarded as the nation’s “true founding,” supplanting the long-honored date of July 4, 1776, which marked the emergence of the United States as an independent nation.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The final four weeks of the campaign will be fought over re-opening the economy By Thomas Lifson

By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/the_final_four_weeks_of_the_campaign_will_be_fought_over_reopening_the_economy.html

Sacrificing the economy, the education of our children, and our collective mental health for the purported purpose of slowing the spread of a disease that is survived by more than 99% of those under 70 who contract it is no longer tolerable, and President Trump is waging his presidential campaign on  ending the madness.

Here is the CDC’s best estimate of the lethality of COVID for each age cohort:

0–19 years: 0.00003
20–49 years: 0.0002
50–69 years: 0.005
70+ years: 0.054

Now that we know how to treat it, COVID is not something to panic over unless you are very old and already have health problems (comorbidities) that are very likely to shorten your expected lifespan even without COVID.

President Trump’s rapid recovery, despite being 74 and overweight (which caused the MSM to go insane, predicting his impending demise over the weekend), stands as dramatic evidence that the panic used to justify devastating the economy and closing schools is foolishly overblown.

YouTube screen grab.

Heather Mac Donald, writing in City Journal, sums up the false panic being peddled by the Democrats and their media handmaidens:

The media and Democratic establishments are in a frenzy of Schadenfreude over President Trump’s COVID diagnosis. Trump’s contracting the disease, they argue, discredits any coronavirus policy short of lockdowns and mandatory mask-wearing, outdoors as well as in. Trump is now “exhibit No. 1 for the failure of his leadership on coronavirus,” Democratic pollster Geoff Garin toldthe New York Times.

By contrast, former Vice President Joe Biden’s basement-bunker response has been vindicated, such commentators allege. Biden drove home his status as the country’s premiere symbol of safetyism on Friday by giving a masked and muffled speech in the vast outdoors of Grand Rapids. No one was within yards of him; Biden could not possibly have become infected or infected anyone else, since transmission in well-ventilated outdoor spaces is virtually nonexistent. Yet such displays of coronavirus virtue-signaling will now multiply exponentially, especially from masked television reporters speaking en plein air to a camera yards away.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Janet Levy-An International Team of Lawyers to Argue Biggest Court Case in History Against “Scamdemic”

By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.brighteon.com/aa072975-9fe9-4606-8592-e5bd3c6373b6

The video below, features Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, a seasoned “fraud-busting” attorney boarded in both California and Germany, who explains how the faulty Wuhan coronavirus PCR tests were adopted as a “diagnostic” tool and how a false sense of fear and panic were induced in the population in violation of international laws of crimes against humanity. Janet Levy

The 49 minute video is well worth a listen.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time — Part XXVII Francis Menton

By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-10-5-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-

It has been more than a year since I last added a post to this series. The previous post in the series, Part XXVI, appeared on August 20, 2019. For all of the prior twenty-six posts, go to this composite link.

There are two reasons for a new post at this time. The first is that there is some new work out from a guy named Tony Heller. The new work can be found at Heller’s website here, with a date of October 1. Heller also indicates that he intends to continue to add to and supplement this work. Heller is an independent researcher who particularly focuses on the subject of this series: alterations to past officially-reported government climate data to create an impression of warming that did not exist in the data as originally reported. Heller is quite skilled at going through reams of government climate data, and turning those data into useful graphs to demonstrate his points. However, in the past I have sometimes been frustrated with Heller’s work for not including sufficient links to enable a reader to verify that his assertions about data alteration are correct. Thankfully, in the current piece, Heller has corrected that issue, and provides the links so that you can see for yourself that the government has changed the data it previously reported in order to artificially enhance the apparent warming trend.

The second reason for a new post at this time is that President Trump has — finally! — hired two climate skeptics into positions of authority over the bureaucracy that compiles, and later alters, the climate data. On September 12, Trump named David Legates to the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Observation and Prediction. And on September 21, Trump named Ryan Maue as Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA is the main bureaucracy where the principal climate data are compiled, and is a part of the Department of Commerce. (Another agency, NASA, is also involved in these efforts.). Both Legates and Maue have been known as people who refuse to accept much of official climate orthodoxy. It is completely bizarre that these appointments would only occur less than two months before the election that could turn Trump out of office, but there you go.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Who Wants to Blow Up Our Constitution? (It’s Not Trump.) .By Charles Lipson

By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/06/who_wants_to_blow_up_our_c

The most profound attacks on Donald Trump are that his presidency is illegitimate and that he wants to destroy our constitutional structure. The Democrats have leveled those accusations for four years, accompanied by charges he is a wannabe dictator, elected thanks to his good buddy, Vladimir Putin.

These frenzied charges, we now know, were invented and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and then funneled to the U.S. government through the FBI, Department of Justice, and State Department. Meanwhile, the CIA and then the FBI were busy spying on the Trump campaign (and, later, in the FBI’s case, on the Trump presidency), trying to find “collusion” with Russia. Their relentless effort led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose partisan team knew almost immediately there was no proof of these damning allegations. They should have told the public immediately.

Instead, they spent the next two years trying — and failing — to catch President Trump on a “process” crime of obstructing justice, without any underlying crime to investigate. They were pursuing a person, not a crime, violating our most basic idea of legitimate law enforcement. Trump actually cooperated fully with the collusion investigation, providing millions of otherwise-privileged documents, but he didn’t bite on a personal interview designed to catch him in a purported false statement. (His promise to cooperate fully with Mueller’s collusion investigation was based on the special counsel’s explicit promise to complete the investigation quickly. Mueller’s team reneged on that assurance after they received all the White House documents and testimony they sought.)

Why bother trying to lure the president into a false-statement trap if you can’t indict him? Simple: because Mueller’s team, effectively led by his zealous deputy, Andrew Weissmann, wanted to help House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, so she could impeach the president.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Leadership in a time of pandemonium Both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump face similar challenges to their political survival Melanie Phillips

By on October 6th, 2020

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/leadership-in-a-time-of-pandemonium?token

It is difficult, to put it mildly, to peer through the blinding blizzards of partisan mainstream media reporting and venomous malice on social media to detect what is actually happening in both American and British political life.

And in fairness to everyone seeking to explain it all, the almost daily shocks being produced by one extraordinary development after another mean that all previous political signposts have been demolished by the storm.

Like the north star, however, there’s one constant we should keep in sight as we try to decipher the fortunes of both US president Donald Trump and British prime minister Boris Johnson. That constant is why each of them was brought to power. 

Although the circumstances are obviously different, the reason was fundamentally the same. Millions of people, who had had it up to here with an arrogant and unaccountable political and cultural establishment intent upon destroying their right to live in a national home of recognisably shared, historic values and traditions and under a rule of law reflecting their own sovereign and democratic consensus, seized the opportunity to elect a leader who promised to uphold that right against that establishment.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum The ‘chemistry’ of anti-Israel propaganda This is not the first time that Ariel University has been targeted by left-wing academics who toe the Palestinian line.

By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-chemistry-of-anti-israel-propaganda/

 When the prominent Switzerland-based chemistry journal Molecules recently announced that its special January 2021 issue would feature a paper from a researcher at Ariel University in Samaria, a group of scientists immediately protested.

Their response had nothing to do with the content of Mindy Levine’s study, however. No, the academics—led by 2018 Nobel Chemistry Prize laureate George Smith and Royal Society of Chemistry fellow Malcolm Levitt—did not concern themselves with their colleague’s work.

All that mattered to them was the mailing address of the institution of higher learning, where Levine heads a lab that engages in toxicant detection, environmental remediation and supramolecular organic chemistry.

In their letter to the editors of Molecules, the group—made up of academics who support Palestinian academics’ non-recognition of Ariel University—demanded that Levine’s article be nixed unless the location of her academic affiliation is “correctly and factually” edited.

But Levine, a new immigrant to Israel from the United States with a background from the University of Rhode Island, Columbia and MIT, had listed the school’s address as “Ariel University, 65 Ramat HaGolan Street, Ariel, Israel.”

The “chemical reaction” on the part of Smith, Levitt and their followers was rage born of believing that their scientific credentials award them automatic knowledge in fields far beyond their purview. They insisted, thus, that the address be changed to read: “Ariel University, illegal Israeli settlement of Ariel, Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Public’s Right to Know about the President’s Health vs. the President’s Right to Medical Confidentiality by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16600/president-health-confidentiality

But there is a countervailing right which few in the media have written about. All Americans have the right to medical confidentiality. This right is assured by federal law, state law, medical ethics and the long traditions of the medical profession. What a patient tells his doctor, or what the doctor observes from the patient, are confidential, subject only to a few limited exceptions.

Among these exceptions is the obligation of doctors to report threats to other people, such as a highly contagious disease. It also includes the obligations of doctors and other professionals to report when they learn of abuse of or by the patient. There is no explicit exception for high ranking public officials, including the president.

All current White Houses leak like sieves. Staff members develop quid pro quo relationships with the media: in exchange for leaking information, the media promises to treat them well. That is the reality of contemporary journalism.

Perhaps the law should be changed and government doctors should have their first obligation to the public. But such a change would come with a high cost: presidents would not disclose to these government doctors information that they did not want to be made public. That might have a negative impact on their medical treatment.

The pubic has a right to know the details of the president’s medical situation. But the president has the right to keep his medical information confidential. There is a conflict between these rights, even when they involve the president of the United States, who is a candidate for reelection. The reason the public has the right to know about the president’s medical history is self-evident. He is the most powerful person in the world and he is seeking a second term. Voters are entitled to know the truth about his medical condition. No one would dispute that.

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