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April 2021

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Data Undercuts Myth of ‘Racism’ in Police Killings John R. Lott

By on April 22nd, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/04/22/data_undercuts_myth_of_racism_in_police_killings_145640.html

President Biden claimed that Derek Chauvin’s conviction on Tuesday “ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism” of police. With the police shooting that same day of 16-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio, the White House again pushed the racism claim, noting that this was just another example of how “police violence disproportionately impacts Black and Latino people.”

But where is the evidence for these claims? In Chauvin’s trial, the prosecution never once mentioned evidence that the now-former officer is racist. A day after the verdict, the Biden administration announced plans for a pattern-or-practice investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department to determine if there is such racism, but the administration’s comments sure sound as if they have already determined the study’s outcome.

In the other case, body camera footage released by police revealed that Ma’Khia Bryant was fatally shot as she charged another girl with a knife. The officer shot one black girl in an attempt to save what appears to be another black girl from being stabbed.

Politicians such as Biden as well as the media have helped create a biased perception that is far from the reality of shootings by police. In a study, the Crime Prevention Research Center (where I serve as president) found that when a white officer kills a suspect, the media usually mention the officer’s race. When the officer is black, news coverage rarely mentions that detail.

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The ‘COVID-19 Hate Crimes’ Bill Is a Thought Crime Bill Ben Weingarten

By on April 22nd, 2021

https://www.newsweek.com/covid-19-hate-crimes-bill-thought-crime-bill-opinion-

In the Woke America we increasingly inhabit, opposing the progressive agenda is treated as tantamount to bigotry. The modern Democratic Party’s modus operandi is to play up that purported bigotry as a pretext to savage and smear political adversaries, run roughshod over our rights, and ultimately usurp power in the self-serving name of virtue and “equity.”

This manifests itself in all kinds of unexpected ways, with unexpectedly far-reaching consequences.

Consider, for example, the original draft of the recently introduced “COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act.”

On its face, the bill, sponsored by Mazie Hirono (D-HI)—the due process-denying, discriminating senator from Hawaii—seemed an almost-parodic piece of show legislation purporting to birth a novel pandemic-based offense.

As Senator Hirono’s related comments made clear, the bill aimed to create the appearance of concern about the rise in anti-Asian hate, while ascribing such hate to Senator Hirono’s political adversaries.

At first glance, the bill’s substantive impact was minimal. The legislation called for the U.S. attorney general to tap a single individual to expedite review of “COVID-19 hate crimes and reports of any such crime to federal, state or local law enforcement agencies.” It also called for the attorney general to direct state and local law enforcement agencies to create online databases of hate crimes or related incidents.

What exactly this would do to combat violence perpetrated against Asians in America was unclear.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Jerkily Spiral Middle East Challenges the USA Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on April 22nd, 2021

https://bit.ly/3sB9Fyo

While US policy in the Middle East focuses on multilateralism, human rights, democracy and international law, the stormy Middle East displays deeply-rooted domestic and regional Shiite (mostly Iran) and Sunni (mostly Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS) repression, terrorism and warfare, as well as imperial aspirations by Iran’s Ayatollahs and Turkey’s Erdogan.

The explosive state of the Middle East has highlighted the vulnerability and the actual/potential disintegration of Arab entities, which have always revered local/tribal – much more than national – loyalty.

This state of affairs emphasizes Western misinterpretation of the unpredictable, violently intolerant, highly fragmented, despotic and dis-functional Middle East, which has systematically frustrated benevolent Western efforts to introduce democracy, tolerance, stability and peaceful-coexistence into the Middle East.

In 2021, the well-armed Middle East is raging with a litany of armed conflicts, domestic and anti-Western terrorism and other forms of violence, which have yielded over 500,000 fatalities and close to 10 million refugees since 2011.

It features Iran (domestic repression and military and terroristic involvement in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, Central Asia, Latin America and Europe), Turkey (the key supporter of the transcontinental Muslim Brotherhood terrorism, and militarily involved in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Horn of Africa and the Persian Gulf); as well as Libya (internationalized civil war and global Islamic terrorism), Egypt (war on Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS terrorism) and Jordan (war on Muslim Brotherhood terrorism and explosive domestic conflicts).  In addition, there are Lebanon (Islamic terrorism and low scale civil war), Syria (internationalized civil war and Islamic terrorism), Iraq (Islamic terrorism and internationalized civil war, while considering Kuwait its own Province 19), Yemen (internationalized civil war and Islamic terrorism), Qatar (financial supporter of Muslim Brotherhood terrorism and closely aligned with Iran and Turkey), Saudi Arabia (war on Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS and Shiite terrorism, as well as war on Iran-supported Yemen-Houthi terrorism), the UAE and Bahrain (war on Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS and Shiite terrorism), etc.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The geriatic wokeness of Joe Biden Freddy Gray

By on April 22nd, 2021

https://spectator.us/topic/bidens-rodeo-geriatric-wokeness/

Joe Biden, the 46th President of the United States, has never been able to keep his mouth shut. Throughout his absurdly long career in politics, he has always said too much, made stuff up, gone too far. His friends and fans just shrug it off. ‘That’s our Joe.’

The trouble is, Biden is now America’s Commander-in-Chief, leader of the not-so-free-anymore world, and his loquaciousness — and the mental fuzziness it betrays — is becoming a problem.

Take, for instance, his decision this week to intervene before the jury reached its verdict on the trial of Derek Chauvin, the white police officer now found guilty of the murder last year of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. ‘I’m praying the verdict is the right verdict. I think it’s overwhelming in my view,’ Biden said. ‘I wouldn’t say that unless the jury was sequestered,’ he quickly added — as if there were nothing untoward in a president weighing in pre-emptively on the most racially charged legal trial in America since the O.J. Simpson case in 1995.

As things turned out, mirabile dictu, the jury agreed with Biden and found Chauvin guilty on all three counts. Yet what ought to have been a calm vindication of American justice was treated as a grubby political show trial. Angry right-wingers will regard the verdict as a sop to left-wing mobs who would have — hell, maybe still will — set fire to cities across America had Chauvin not gone down. Chauvin’s lawyers are expected to claim that their client was not given a fair trial due to the monstrous public pressure surrounding the case.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Anaphylactic and societal shock: An Israeli parable By RUTHIE BLUM

By on April 22nd, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/anaphylactic-and-societal-shock-an-israeli-parable-opinion-666060

  

Israelis were horrified last week by the untimely death of 23-year-old Osher Deri, a resident of the northern town of Hatzor Haglilit. 

Echoes of the collective gasp that the tragedy elicited can still be heard across the country, along with debates about where to place the blame and calls for measures to prevent the same kind of thing from happening in the future.

The unfathomable event occurred on April 14. Finishing dinner with a friend at a kosher meat restaurant in Rosh Pina, Deri ordered her favorite dessert. As she stuck her fork in the chocolate cake covered in what was supposed to be non-dairy whipped cream, her buddy, Eden Shoshan, took a photo and posted it on Instagram. Neither young woman could have imagined that this would be Deri’s last picture – the one that would continue for days to accompany newspaper articles and TV broadcasts about the heartbreaking incident.

It began when Deri took a mouthful of the topping, which she rightly believed to be parve. For one thing, no kosher meat restaurant serves dairy products, or even has them on the premises. For another, Deri had eaten this particular dessert on several occasions. 

No sooner had she swallowed a spoonful, however, did she begin to have an allergic reaction.

“There’s milk in this!” she suddenly blurted out, while Shoshan ran to the chef to ask about the dessert’s ingredients. Though he initially assured her that it couldn’t possibly contain milk, a subsequent check revealed that an egregious error had been made. 

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BOOKS, CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Death by Harmony The mechanics of Chinese repression are a frightening marvel. Ilan Berman

By on April 22nd, 2021

http://www.ilanberman.com/25310/death-by-harmony

We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State

by Kai Strittmatter (Custom House, 368 pp., $28.99)

In his masterful new book, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State, veteran German journalist Kai Strittmatter chronicles the state surveillance arrangements that have become the world’s most advanced. He lays out for the reader the now-commonplace features of contemporary life in China: “preventative policing;” a social credit system that enforces citizen compliance through surveillance, economic penalties, and community pressure; “deep learning” algorithms that track items from consumer habits to offensive social media posts; and state manipulation of media content on a mass scale.

We Have Been Harmonized documents the pervasive ways in which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has expanded into virtually every aspect of the lives of its citizens. It has done so with a set of singular goals: to eliminate dissent, reinforce the regime’s legitimacy, and force conformity. These objectives, driven by the government’s encouragement of nationalist sentiment and a massive aggregation of power by current Communist Party General Secretary and PRC President Xi Jinping, have been facilitated in recent years by a profusion of next-generation technologies.

In meticulous detail, Strittmatter explores and explains both the mechanics of these enablers of China’s 21st-century authoritarianism and their effects. His narrative includes Xinjiang, where technology has made possible the mass internment of over a million Uighur Muslims and the monitoring of millions more. It extends to the way in which China’s censors have policed, shaped, and, ultimately, stifled the country’s previously vibrant social media. The examples vary, but all of them follow a familiar arc: one of profound societal control designed to diminish critical thought, instill a single-minded allegiance to the party, impose docility and conformity, and encourage a trade-off between privacy and prosperity.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Opinion: The ADL –  Democrats who happen to be Jewish By David Isaac

By on April 22nd, 2021

https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-the-adl-democrats-who-happen-to-be-jewish/

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called for Fox New host Tucker Carlson’s head earlier this month.

In an over-the-top letter to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott on April 9, ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt said, “It is time for Carlson to go.” Carlson’s crime? According to the ADL letter, “an impassioned defense of the white supremacist ‘great replacement theory,’ the hateful notion that the white race is in danger of being ‘replaced’ by a rising tide of non-whites.”

Fox Chairman and CEO Lachlan Murdoch politely declined, pointing out that Carlson “decried and rejected replacement theory” in the April 8 episode in question. Carlson, for his part, gleefully replayed the segment as part of a longer discussion on April 13.

We have watched the segments closely and see nothing from Carlson worthy of the ADL’s censure.

Neither did 1,500 Orthodox rabbis represented by the Coalition for Jewish Values. They publicly went to the mat rebuking the ADL for “grossly misplaced charges of anti-Semitism.”

Carlson argued that “demographic change is the key to the Democratic party’s political ambitions. … When you change who votes, you change who wins. That has nothing inherently to do with race or nationality. It is the nature of democracy.”

One may or may not agree with this, but it’s not anti-Semitism.

Jonathan Tobin, the dean of American Jewish journalism, said the real weakness of the ADL’s argument “is that up until recently, the ones talking about immigrants replacing or overwhelming white voters have been liberals.”

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J Street Embraces Mahmoud Abbas; How Will US Jews Respond? by Moshe Phillips

By on April 22nd, 2021

https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/04/22/j-street-embraces-mahmoud-abbas-how-will-us-jews-respond/

J Street’s decision to feature Mahmoud Abbas at its “first-ever virtual national conference” earlier this week, demonstrates just how far J Street is from it being the firmly pro-Israel, Zionist group it wants American Jews to believe it is.

Just three years ago this month — on April 30, 2018 — Abbas stood before the Palestine National Council’s opening session (PNC) and delivered a blatantly antisemitic speech.

Abbas stated that Jews have “no historical ties” to the Land of Israel, because they are actually descendants of the Turkish Khazar tribe (a bizarre and long-discredited conspiracy theory).

Abbas also said there has never been an antisemitic incident against Jews in Arab countries — “Not even once,” he declared. “Do you think I’m exaggerating? I challenge you [to find] even one incident against Jews in over 1,400 years.”

Then, Abbas insinuated that the Holocaust was caused by the Jews’ own “social behavior, [charging] interest, and financial matters.”

Abbas’ previous claims about the Holocaust — described in detail in his 1982 doctoral dissertation and subsequent book — include that only a few hundred thousand, not six million, Jews were killed by the Nazis; and that David Ben-Gurion collaborated with the Nazis to kill Jews, to garner world sympathy for creating a Jewish state.

What did J Street — which now speaks of “moderate Palestinian leaders” —  say about Abbas’ speech?

In a May 1, 2018, press release, J Street said that it “strongly condemns remarks made by President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday that featured absurd antisemitic tropes and deeply offensive comments on the history of the Jewish people and Israel.” J Street called Abbas’ speech “incendiary,” and argued that “there is absolutely no excuse” for what he said.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Nuclear Deal Talks Advance as U.S. Offers Sanctions Relief Biden administration signals openness to easing measures against oil, finance and other sectors, but Tehran wants to see specifics

By on April 22nd, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-nuclear-deal-talks-advance-as-u-s-offers-sanctions-relief-11619024783

The Biden administration has signaled it is open to easing sanctions against critical elements of Iran’s economy, including oil and finance, helping narrow differences in nuclear talks, according to people familiar with the matter.

Despite the progress, senior diplomats warned that weeks of difficult negotiations over the 2015 nuclear agreement lie ahead and progress remains fragile. Talks in Vienna are complicated by domestic politics in Washington and Tehran and by Iran’s refusal to meet directly with the U.S.

President Biden wants to return to the 2015 deal after former President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018. The U.S. decision to quit the deal and impose sweeping sanctions on Iran prompted Tehran to breach many of the key restrictions in the accord, making a return to the agreement’s provisions and limits difficult for both sides.

Senior officials in Vienna this week wrapped up five days of talks, with delegations returning home before negotiations resume next week. People involved in the talks say progress has come as the U.S. laid out more clearly the contours of the sanctions relief it is prepared to provide.

Many of the sanctions were imposed under Mr. Trump using U.S. terrorism authorities, and U.S. officials previously have said they are willing to consider lifting some of them. But they haven’t detailed which sanctions could be eased or which Iranian entities stand to be affected.

Two people familiar with the matter said the U.S. is open to lifting terror sanctions against Iran’s central bank, its national oil and tanker companies and several key economic sectors including steel, aluminum and others. A senior European official said Washington has also signaled potential sanctions relief for sectors including textiles, autos, shipping and insurance, all industries Iran was earmarked to gain from in the 2015 agreement.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s Fishing Fleet, the World’s Largest, Drives Beijing’s Global Ambitions Governments and conservation groups accuse the ships of fishing illegally and advancing military goals Chuin-Wei Yap

By on April 22nd, 2021

http://China’s Fishing Fleet, the World’s Largest, Drives Beijing’s Global Ambitions Governments and conservation groups accuse the ships of fishing illegally and advancing military goals

In Beijing’s push to become a maritime superpower, China’s fishing fleet has grown to become the world’s largest by far—and it has turned more aggressive, provoking tensions around the globe.

The fleet brings in millions of tons of seafood a year to feed the country’s booming middle class. Foreign governments, fishermen and conservation groups have accused the fleet of illegal fishing, including by using banned equipment and venturing into other countries’ territory. That fishing has upended local economies and threatens ecosystems including around the Galápagos Islands, affected governments and fishermen say.

The Chinese fleet is helping the country stake out a bigger presence at sea, including by building a world-wide network of ports. The vessels, rigged with winches and booms and pulling giant nets, can be twice as large as a naval patrol boat, at an average of almost 200 feet long. Fishing crews have helped establish island settlements in waters subject to territorial disputes with neighbors.

An analysis of transponder and global vessel registration data indicates Chinese boats involved in distant-water operations—meaning outside a country’s own territorial waters—total as many as 17,000, according to London-based researcher Overseas Development Institute. Official data and analyst estimates indicate China’s closest competitors in the industry, Taiwan and South Korea, have some 2,500 such vessels combined.

China’s foreign ministry said that legally registered vessels were far lower, at 2,701 as of 2019. China agreed to cap its fishing vessels at 3,000 in 2017, in response to World Trade Organization efforts to cut government subsidies that contribute to overfishing.

The ministry said that Beijing implements the world’s strictest oversight on distant-water fishing. It has toughened legal penalties on errant fishing in recent years.

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