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November 2020

Israelis’ Worries Center on Biden’s Plans to Negotiate with Iran By P. David Hornik

https://pjmedia.com/columns/p-david-hornik/2020/11/13/israelis-worries-center-on-bidens-plans-to-negotiate-with-iran-n1141462

There’s no question about who Israel’s majority Jewish population was rooting for on November 3. A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found 70 percent of Jewish Israelis supporting Trump, 13 percent preferring Biden, and 17 percent who didn’t know. Strikingly, with respondents defining themselves as right-wing, centrist, or left-wing, half of the left-wingers came out in favor of Trump.

Israelis, in other words, are well aware of the remarkable record Trump racked up in four years as history’s most pro-Israel president, which included: moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem; recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; defunding the Palestinian Authority until it behaves decently and constructively; coming up with a realistic peace plan in which Israel retains indispensable parts of the West Bank; brokering peace deals with three Arab states; and — not least — treating Israel as the U.S. treats its other allies instead of constantly berating it publicly.

Most probably, though, those days are gone, and speculations now center on what to expect from a Biden presidency — particularly regarding the Palestinians and Iran. On the Palestinian track, Biden is likely, unfortunately, to throw out Trump’s peace plan and return to the “Clinton parameters” or worse, in which Israel gives up virtually all of the West Bank and turns Jerusalem into a divided, warring city. Even so, with domestic issues on his plate like COVID-19 and an economy striving to recover from the pandemic, many believe Biden won’t replicate Barack Obama’s obsession with the stubborn, self-pitying Palestinians — who have proved unamenable to peacemakers since the late 1930s.

CNN Compares The Trump Administration To Genocidal Nazi Germany By Evita Duffy

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/13/cnn-compares-the-trump-administration-to-genocidal-nazi-germany/

CNN British journalist Christiane Amanpour this week compared the Trump administration to Kristallnacht, an attack on German Jews during the Third Reich that, as Amanpour said, “led to genocide against a whole identity.”

Amanpour, CNN’s Chief International Anchor and host of CNN International’s nightly interview program, told viewers that President Donald Trump has waged a similar assault on “fact, knowledge, history, and truth,” as the Nazis did during Kristallnacht and the rest of the Third Reich’s existence.

“After four years of a modern-day assault on those same values by Donald Trump, the Biden-Harris team pledges a return to norms,” said Amanpour.

Kristallnacht occurred November 9-10, 1938, when German Nazis burned synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools, and businesses, and killed close to 100 Jewish people. It is often referred to as the “Night of Broken Glass.”

5 Historical Trends That Show It’s Utterly Shocking If Trump Lost In 2020 By J.B. Shurk

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/13/5-historical-trends-that-show-its-utterly-shocking-if-trump-lost-in-2020/

If I told you an incumbent president had 52 percent approval on Election Day and ended up winning 10 million more votes than during his first election, would you predict victory? What if 56 percent of voters felt they were better off since the president had entered office? What if you knew that the incumbent had a nearly 30 percent enthusiasm edge over his opponent, or that when asked for whom they thought their neighbors were voting, nearly 10 percent more Americans expected the president to be re-elected than to lose?

With those numbers in mind, wouldn’t you feel pretty confident that the sitting president had, indeed, been re-elected? Alternatively, wouldn’t you consider it an amazing feat if, instead, the president’s challenger was victorious? The improbability of that result should be newsworthy all on its own.

Donald Trump has majority approval. Nearly six in 10 Americans feel better off today than when Barack Obama was in office, and 15 percent more voters pulled the lever for his re-election than in his 2016 victory. These are not the numbers of a losing candidate, yet we’re told Joe Biden managed to prevail.

The media and pollsters, of course, predicted a Biden landslide, not a very narrow squeaker in which Democrats lost in almost every other avenue of government. Considering the following five facts about the election, it’s no wonder Biden failed to achieve a landslide victory.

1. 10 Million More Votes

Not since President Grover Cleveland’s re-election campaign in 1888 has a sitting president won more votes the second time around and still lost, which is one reason he successfully ran again four years later. To put this in perspective, Obama lost 5 million votes between his 2008 and 2012 elections. He is the only president to have lost voters and still won re-election.

MOSHE PHILLIPS The Zionist left and the PLO flag: A troubling episode

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-zionist-left-and-the-plo-flag-a-troubling-episode/

Objecting to the reproduction of a hate map should not be a partisan issue. Palestinian Arab violence has never distinguished between left-wing and right-wing Jews.

Flags mean something. Countries, states and even terrorist organizations design their flags to make a statement about their history, values or aspirations.

America’s stars and stripes symbolize the original 13 colonies and 50 states of the union. Canada’s maple leaf alludes to its natural resources.

On the other end of the moral spectrum, the Nazis adopted the swastika because they believed it was connected to “Aryan” history. Hezbollah’s flag features the slogan “Party of Allah” and an assault rifle. The PLO and its governing arm, the Palestinian Authority, have used a number of emblems over the years. One features a map of all of Israel—not just the disputed territories, but all of Israel—across which are the words, “Palestine from the river to the sea,” in Arabic.

A maple leaf may not convey a particularly powerful message. But a map asserting that all of Israel is really “Palestine” and needs to be conquered sends a very powerful message to the Palestinian Arab public. When the ruling P.A. regime displays such a map, it is telling Palestinian Arabs what their goal should be.

About Atlanta’s Election Day Pipe Dream David Catron

ttps://spectator.org/pipe-burst-georgia-election/

Election Day 2020 was unusual for several predictable reasons involving high in-person turnout and veritable avalanches of mail-in ballots. One exceptionally odd event, however, took everyone by surprise — vote counting suddenly stopped for hours in several key swing states late Tuesday night. One of these mysterious halts occurred in Fulton County, Georgia, where election officials insisted that a broken water pipe necessitated a four-hour delay before counting of absentee ballots could resume. Yet evidence for what would have been quite a serious plumbing issue has been strangely elusive. There doesn’t appear to be any paperwork involving this leak.

Atlanta lawyer Paul Dzikowski, like many of us who vote in Georgia, was interested in the details of an incident serious enough to stop the vote-counting process for hours yet had been covered only in passing by the news media. As he expressed it in one email to me, “I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that News Corp. from Australia picked up this story from halfway around the world but CNN hasn’t bothered … even though CNN’s headquarters are literally in the same building.” Dzikowski invoked the Georgia Open Records Act last Monday in a written request for copies of all records involving the burst pipe, including memoranda, notes, work orders, requisitions, invoices, and other related repair records.

Despite Covid-19 Pandemic, UN’s World Health Organization Spends Four Hours Bashing Israel by Benjamin Kerstein

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/11/12/despite-covid-19-pandemic-uns-world-heal

Despite a ongoing global pandemic that has taken over a million lives, the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) took time on Thursday to condemn Israel.

The group’s annual assembly held a four-hour session in which 30 representatives of countries such as Syria, North Korea, and Iran blasted Israel for supposedly violating the health rights of Palestinians and Syrians.

The assembly then adopted a resolution condemning Israel and pledging to prepare a report on the Jewish state’s supposed misdeeds.

Among the nations that attacked Israel at the session was Iran, which accused it of conducting an “inhuman blockade” of the Gaza Strip that had a “profound impact on the health sector.”

Countries voting in favor of the resolution included, among others, France, India, Ireland and Spain.

Israel, the US, the UK, Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, Honduras and Hungary all voted against it.

Hillel Neuer — executive director of the Geneva-based NGO UN Watch — called the proceedings a “cynical politicization of the world’s top health agency at the expense of focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic and other vital global health priorities and emergencies.”

Neuer said the charges made against Israel at the session were untrue, pointing out, “Despite the conflict, Israel grants entry to tens of thousands of Palestinians who receive top-level medical care at Israeli hospitals. Even the UN’s own Middle East peace envoy hailed Israel’s ‘excellent’ coordination and cooperation with Palestinians amid the coronavirus pandemic.”

Arizona State Rep Calls for Audit and Recount of Vote By Bowen Xiao

https://www.theepochtimes.com/arizona-state-rep-calls-for-audit-and-recount-of-vote_3576918.html?utm_source=news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2020-11-13-3

Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend said there should “absolutely” be an audit and an accurate recount as soon as possible in the state, adding that voter confidence for many has been damaged.

Townsend, a Republican who serves the 16th Legislative District, said she has a “long list of things that are questionable” and that hundreds of Arizonians have contacted her over perceived irregularities and concerns over the integrity of the state’s election process.

“We need an audit and a recount—there are too many uncertainties and until we do that, I don’t think there’s enough confidence to have a healthy election in the future,” she told The Epoch Times. “We need to reassure the people that their vote counted because right now it is chaos.”

Townsend said she has “no faith” in the state’s election process, adding that “the vote should not be certified under these circumstances.”

“The biggest issue is voter confidence,” she added. “If you don’t have voter confidence you have big problems—and we don’t have voter confidence.”

Questioning of USPS Whistleblower ‘Clearly’ Sought to Weaken Election Fraud Claim, FBI Veteran Says By Petr Svab

https://www.theepochtimes.com/questioning-of-usps-whistleblower-clearly-sought-to-weaken-voter-fraud-claim-fbi-veteran-says_3576905.html

A U.S. Postal Service whistleblower in Pennsylvania was questioned by agency investigators in a way that was designed to undermine his allegations of voter fraud, according to a veteran FBI agent.

The whistleblower, Richard Hopkins, had told investigative journalism nonprofit Project Veritas that he overheard a USPS postmaster pull aside a supervisor to tell them that they “messed up” in marking a ballot “for the 4th, instead of the 3rd, because they were supposed to put them for the 3rd,” referring to Nov. 3, Election Day.

Hopkins deduced the officials were talking about backdating ballots that arrived late so they could still be counted in the election. He affirmed what he told Project Veritas in an affidavit.

During the subsequent questioning by two USPS investigators, Hopkins said they got him to question himself. He acknowledged that he didn’t hear the entire conversation and that it’s possible he misunderstood what the officials were talking about, according to Hopkins’s recording that captured at least half of the interview.

After the interview, he made it clear he stands by his original allegations.

From the recording, it appears the investigators were using interrogation methods normally used to extract a confession rather than to interview a witness, according to Mark Ruskin, a 27-year veteran of the FBI and former assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, New York.

FEC Chairman Says He Believes ‘There Is Voter Fraud’ in Key States By Jack Phillips

https://www.theepochtimes.com/fec-chairman-says-he-believes-theres-voter-fraud-in-key-states_3577710.html

The chairman of the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) stated that he believes there is evidence of voter fraud and other alleged irregularities.

In a recent interview, FEC Chairman Trey Trainor said reports of fraud in some battleground states are credible “otherwise they would allow the [poll] observers to go in,” referring to reports of some polling areas refusing to allow GOP observers to check on the process on Election Day and the days after.

“When you have claims of, you know, 10,000 people who don’t live in the state of Nevada having voted in Nevada, you have the video … they’re (poll workers) either duplicating a spoiled ballot right there or they’re in the process of just marking a ballot that came in blank for a voter,” Trainor told Newsmax. “That’s a process that needs to be observed by election observers.”

In the interview, he agreed with Trump’s campaign lawsuits, while saying that questionable actions by elections officials in several states could make the election illegitimate.

Trainor, an appointee of President Donald Trump, noted that state laws allow those observers to be there, and “if they’re not,” then it’s an “illegitimate election.”

Why Democrats Ought Not Celebrate Too Hard Frank Miele,

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/11/13/why_democrats_ought_not_celebrate_too_hard_144652.htm

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There is something unseemly about the Democrats’ insistence that the apparent defeat of President Trump in the recent election is a repudiation of Republican policies.

The two key words in that sentence are “apparent” and “repudiation.”

First of all, as everyone knows but the news media refuse to acknowledge, Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory is unofficial, and if there were a plot to steal the election in battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, then Biden’s “apparent” victory could possibly turn into jail time for some high-placed Democrats.

One of the most compelling reasons why the GOP might be able to find evidence of election fraud is that so-called “repudiation” of Trump and his policies that Democrats have been trumpeting for the last two weeks. You know, the repudiation where the alleged white supremacist increased his share of the black vote nationwide from 8% in 2016 to 12% in 2020. The repudiation where “Build That Wall” Trump went from 28% of the Latino vote to 34% in four years. The repudiation where Trump’s support among women ticked upward – and did so among male voters as well.

Either way, I suppose the current status of the presidential election justifies a celebration by Democrats for the time being. Too bad for them – it may be the last celebration they get to enjoy for quite some while.