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May 2021

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

As Biden Tries To Get the Band Back Together, Iran’s Ally Attacks By Benny Avni

By on May 11th, 2021

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/as-biden-tries-to-get-the-old-band-back-together/9

Let’s retire the phrase “fake news.” The right word for the statements from the Biden White House, the State Department, the Europeans and the United Nations, all of whom are calling for a de-escalation of the violence in Jerusalem, is counterfactual. The fact is that the sudden escalation in violence, centered in a real estate dispute in east Jerusalem, is dictated, mostly, by Hamas.

The Gaza-based terror organization decides when to shoot and at what targets. It is in a fury because the Palestinian Authority decided to cancel a scheduled election that Hamas was predicted to win. Eventually Hamas will also decide to end the current round of hostilities and beg for a ceasefire. Israel will quickly abide. Meantime, Hamas has decided to turn its fire to Israel.

The terrorist organization hitched a ride on a confluence of events, including the end of the holy month of Ramadan; Arab unrest over a real estate dispute at East Jerusalem; Israel’s annual celebration of Jerusalem Day; and riots at the al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount. On Monday, Hamas announced an ultimatum for Israel to end its activities on the Temple Mount by 6 p.m. local o’clock.

When the deadline arrived, the al Aqsa area was actually fairly quiet. Yet Hamas launched a barrage of missiles from Gaza a few seconds after the 6pm deadline. Seven missiles were aimed at Jerusalem, far beyond the usual targeting range. One missile fell in Kiryat Anavim. At the same time, several rockets were launched at Sderot and other towns near the Gaza border that are all too familiar with such attacks.

All this is unfolding amid one of the bitterest feuds in the history of parliamentary democracy — the scramble to try to form a new government. Despite this, Israeli politicians, almost to a man and woman, vowed to back the decisions to respond forcefully that are being made by the premier nearly everyone outside of Likud wants to replace, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defense minister.

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DAVID'S SLINGSHOT DPS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tribalism has come to the West Hostile and polarized, today’s America reminds me of my Somalian clan Ayaan Hirsi Ali

By on May 11th, 2021

https://unherd.com/2021/05/tribalism-has-come-to-the-west/

About a decade ago, when I worked for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), I had to force myself to go to lunch with a friend. I dreaded the meeting because I knew that she was going to try to convince me to leave my job. AEI is a pro-business, conservative-leaning think tank in Washington, DC. My friend was an enthusiastic liberal.

After I had run out of excuses, the day arrived and, predictably, after a few minutes of the usual small talk, my friend launched into a tirade about the Iraq War, which several of my colleagues strongly supported.

“You don’t belong there, Ayaan,” she said.

I remember trying to steer the conversation on to actual policies. I had voted for supporting the American coalition in Iraq when I was a Member of Parliament in The Netherlands — and I started to explain why.

But she wasn’t interested in a rational discussion. She interrupted me mid-sentence, launching into a monologue about John Bolton, the former Ambassador to the United Nations and a fellow at AEI (and subsequently National Security Advisor to President Trump). Bolton, my friend insisted, was a loathsome, hateful, racist, neo-conservative warmonger. The list went on and on until eventually she said that he looked like a walrus with a moustache. You could tell by his physiognomy, she explained, that he was a psychopath.

“But what about the policies?” I responded, trying to redirect the conversation away from personalities. The more she spoke, the more I recognised her broad disposition as something I had experienced earlier in my life. Her attitude was almost entirely tribal. Two things, in particular, stood out: an almost blind hatred of a particular group (Republicans); and secondly, the use of deeply personal attacks on individual researchers to justify that hatred.

Today, ten years later, this attitude seems to be the prevailing norm. Numerous studies support the hypothesis that American life — not just politics, but life in general — has become deeply polarised. The deeply divided society we now live in increasingly reminds me of clan or tribal behaviour in Africa.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Realignment In the Middle East, Biden is finishing what Obama started. And his top advisers are all on board. By Michael Doran & Tony Badran

By on May 11th, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/realignment-iran-bid

“Biden chose Iran, fracturing the U.S. alliance system and setting back the cause of peace. His choice also delivered a victory to China and Russia, who are working with Iran, each in its own way, toward America’s undoing. In a perverse effort to liberate itself from its allies, the United States is soiling its own nest.”

On Sunday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan phoned his Israeli counterpart and turned back the hands of time. According to the American readout of the conversation, Sullivan called “to express the United States’ serious concerns” about two things: the pending eviction, by court order, of a number of Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, and the weekend’s violent clashes on the Temple Mount between Israeli police and Palestinian rioters. The Biden administration, in other words, publicly asserted an American national interest in preventing the Sheikh Jarrah evictions, regardless of the dictates of Israeli law—just as Hamas was sending rockets and incendiary devices into Israel with the same message. This conscious effort to put “daylight” between the United States and Israel marked a clear return to the approach of President Barack Obama.

Sullivan’s call invites us to reopen an unresolved debate that began even before President Joe Biden took the oath of office. Is the new president forging his own path in the Middle East, or is he following in the footsteps of Obama? Until now, those who feared that his presidency might become the third term of Obama fixed their wary eyes on Robert Malley, the president’s choice as Iran envoy. When serving in the Obama White House, Malley helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, which sought accommodations with Tehran that came at the expense of America’s allies in the Middle East. In a revealing Foreign Affairs article, written in 2019, Malley expressed regret that Obama failed to arrive at more such accommodations. The direction of Obama’s policy was praiseworthy, Malley wrote, but his “moderation” was the enemy of his project. Being “a gradualist,” he presided over “an experiment that got suspended halfway through.”

Malley, the article leads one to assume, is now advising Biden to go all the way—and fast. But surely it is the president, not his Iran envoy, who determines the direction and pace of policy. Over the course of a career in Washington spanning nearly half a century, Biden has never cut a radical profile. Nor have Sullivan or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The presence of this pair at Biden’s side signaled to many that Malley would not drive Iran policy. Shortly after the election, a veteran Washington insider noted to a journalist that “Blinken and Sullivan are certainly from the more moderate wing of the party, and that is reassuring.”

At his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Blinken continued to reassure by expressing his intention to fix the defects of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the Iran nuclear deal is known. The following month, Foreign Policy reported that a split had opened up inside the government, with Sullivan and Blinken fulfilling the hopes placed on them. When Malley argued in favor of giving “inducements” to Iran to convince it to return quickly to the JCPOA, Sullivan and Blinken “dominated the discussion” by “toeing a harder line.”

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

There is a new way to smear Zionism – opinion Bashing nationalism is very desirable in academic circles these days, and bashing Jewish nationalism and the Zionist movement is especially popular. By Moshe Phillips

By on May 11th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/there-is-a-new-way-to-smear-zionism-opinion-667601

Jewish academic critics of Israel have come up with a new smear tactic: falsely portraying Jewish nationalism as being intimately tied to the evils of 19th-century “white-settler colonialism.”

That was the theme of a May 4 online program called “Baja California Dreaming: How US Settler Colonialism Shapes Jewish Nationalism,” hosted by the University of California at Davis. The featured speaker was Maxwell Greenberg, a doctoral candidate at UCLA, and the “respondent” was Sarah Imhoff, a professor at UC-Davis.

Greenberg’s remarks focused on a handful of American Jewish philanthropists in San Francisco who in the 1890s were looking for a way to save Russia’s Jews from the pogroms: the systemic, violent anti-Jewish riots of the time. These US Jews came up with the idea of purchasing some land in the Baja section of Mexico where Russian Jewish refugees could live and work.

But the plan never advanced past the point of a few discussions and a pamphlet or two. They didn’t purchase any land and they didn’t bring in any refugees. So why should anybody care about it today? Why did UC-Davis choose to feature the topic in its prestigious “New Directions in Jewish Studies” series, choosing Greenberg’s proposal from among 70 scholarly submissions?

Apparently because bashing nationalism is very desirable in academic circles these days, and bashing Jewish nationalism and the Zionist movement is especially popular.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Michelle Claims to ‘Live in Fear,’ Barack Actually Does By Jack Cashill

By on May 10th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/michelle_claims_to_live_in_fear_barack_actually_does.html

On Friday’s broadcast of “CBS This Morning,” Michelle Obama made the delusional claim, one among several, that “many of us still live in fear as we go to the grocery store, or walking our dogs, or allowing our children to get a license.”

Had Michelle attributed that fear to a wariness of black drive-by gang bangers or street muggers, it might have made some sense. But her fear, she implied, was of racist police.

Barack Obama knows better, but he has lived in fear as well. That fear deformed his presidency and sent the nation spiraling down a lethal rabbit hole that has benefited no one more than the Mao-loving matrons of BLM.  

Not surprisingly, as I learned in researching my forthcoming book, Barack Obama’s Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, there is no one Barack fears more than wife Michelle, his personal emissary from the world of authentic African-Americans.

In a May 2011 interview, activist professor Cornel West nailed Obama on this fear. “All he has known culturally is white,” said West. “He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.”

Obama had reason to be frightened. Following a Father’s Day speech by Obama at a largely black Chicago church in 2008, Jesse Jackson was heard on a hot mic at a Fox News studio saying, “See, Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith-based—I wanna cut his nuts out.”

Here Jackson made a sharp slicing motion with his hands and continued, “Barack—he’s talking down to black people—telling n*****s how to behave.”  In the original, as one might expect, Jackson did not speak in asterisks.

Obama had made the rookie mistake of attributing the absurd crime rate in America’s black neighborhoods to fatherlessness. Jackson, Chicago’s most prominent baby daddy, suggested that a leftward course correction was in order, and Obama cravenly obliged him.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The father who fought Brearley School racism has a message for everyone By Andrea Widburg

By on May 10th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/the_father_who_fought_brearley_school_racism_has_a_message_for_everyone.html

Even as the Biden administration doubles down on Critical Race Theory, a dishonest, divisive, toxic idea holding that Whites are racist, inferior creatures who have used their unfairly obtained privilege to oppress Blacks and other races, parents are beginning to fight back. It turns out that, once you ignore cancel culture make a statement, there are a lot of people who want to follow your lead. One of those parents, to his surprise, found himself at the head of a brewing revolution.

Three weeks ago, two letters exploded on the New York education scene and started echoing through the rest of America. The first was from a teacher challenging Grace Church High School’s anti-white Critical Race Theory indoctrination. The second letter was from Andrew Gutmann, who spoke out against the same indoctrination at Brearley school. Both schools are expensive, claim to be elite, and are teaching a doctrine every bit as toxic as the Jim Crow, eugenics garbage that Democrats promoted in the first half of the 20th Century.

While the teacher’s letter was an eye-opener, the fact that Gutmann is a parent meant that his letter resonated with parents across American. To his surprise, he’s found himself leading the charge for these parents. In an opinion piece in the New York Post, Gutmann describes the positive feedback he’s getting, as well as the fact that there is a huge battle ahead for those parents unhappy about the hard left turn their children’s education has taken:

I am enormously gratified by the overwhelmingly supportive emails and messages that I have personally received. Countless parents expressed to me their appreciation for stating clearly and forcibly what so many Americans have been thinking but have been too afraid to state out loud. Many also conveyed that they felt newly emboldened to speak up for their children. I have learned that my letter has been circulated and discussed in Board of Trustees meetings of schools across the country and I have been told that it has begun to make an impact. Even Brearley, after initially dismissing the contents of my letter and indicating a desire to double down on antiracism initiatives has, for the very first time, offered parents an opportunity to ask questions about the school’s diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracist initiatives. 

That’s the good news. The bad news is that Gutmann learned from the outpouring of messages that, in a single year, Critical Race Theory has become deeply embedded in American education from kindergarten through to graduate work:

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

Life Finds a Way Objectivity is the Objective By: Judd Garrett

By on May 10th, 2021

https://www.objectivityistheobjective.com/post/life-finds-a-way

“The kind of control you’re attempting here is… it’s not possible,” Dr. Malcom told billionaire John Hammond in the movie, Jurassic Park, when it was explained that all the dinosaurs on the island were female, because “there is no unauthorized breeding in Jurassic Park.” Dr. Malcom argued that, “life will not be contained. Life breaks free. Expands to new places and crashes through barriers.”

When asked by resident scientist Henry Wu, “You’re implying that a group composed entirely of females will… breed?” Dr. Malcolm simply replied, “life… finds a way.” He was proven right later in the movie when fellow scientist Dr. Grant stumbled upon a nest of recently hatched dinosaur eggs in the wild. Dr. Grant whispered to himself, “life finds a way.”

I thought of this quote many times over the last 15 months with each new mandate and restriction that was imposed on our country. No matter how much the government wanted to control and restrict small businesses and restaurants, many were able to “find a way” to work in and around the restrictions to stay viable, to stay alive. From hand sanitizing stations to social distancing tables to outdoor dining, curbside pick-up, or enhanced delivery service, these businesses found a way no matter how many rules and restrictions the government imposed on them which should have run them out of business.

This is why black markets spring up inside Communist and fascist countries. Black markets are free markets living alongside the restrictive controlling markets of totalitarian countries. But more to the point, black markets are life finding a way, not being contained, breaking free. That is the natural state of humanity, of all life, freedom.

When Facebook, Twitter, YouTube were censoring and blocking the accounts of conservatives, free speech Parler emerged and received millions of subscribers in one day. When they shut that platform down, other free speech sites Gab and Rumble popped up. Life finds a way. Do they think our voices will be contained? Do they think we will not find alternative avenues to voice our beliefs if these other sites get shut down as well? In Nazi Germany and Communist Russia when the government controlled the press and shut down dissenting voices, the truth was printed in basements and attics and spread through the underground. Life found a way.

We are living through a dystopian time in our country, a time that was never envisioned by our founders, a time that would have horrified them, a vision of our country completely opposite of the original vision. The rights and freedoms of United States citizens are being incrementally and systematically taken. But the level of control over the population that our current leaders are attempting is impossible. Life is freedom, and freedom is life, and life will always find a way.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tuning Out Wokeism The current madness is the stuff of history as we watch it predictably unfold, until—and if—a few, a “happy few,” finally say to the mob, “no mas.”  By Victor Davis Hanson

By on May 10th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/09/tuning-out-wokeism/

If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

911 No Longer

As big-city prosecutors choose not to prosecute “property crimes” or “brick and mortar” arsons and thefts, or what they consider “minor” misdemeanors or “nonlethal” felonies, crime spikes. The ancient principle of human nature then reigns supreme. The criminally inclined conclude the upside of hurting the weak, killing the innocent, stealing, destroying, looting, or simply causing mayhem far outweighs the rarer downside of being arrested, convicted, incarcerated, or worse. So all deterrence is lost. A cycle of chacun pour soi prevails.

Police in response make the necessary adjustments. Consider their bleak choices. Either they: 

1) Go into increasingly high crime areas and get attacked or shot in the failed effort to make an arrest or restore calm; or

2) proceed to make an arrest, but the suspect, usually with prior felony convictions, resists, bolts, or attacks, and they use force to subdue him. In some cases, they can make a decision to risk doing so lethally, if they judge, rightly or wrongly, that the arrested is a threat to their lives. As a result, they are suspended, ruined, doxxed, vilified in the media, and their families and homes are put in danger; or 

3) they apprehend the suspect, make the arrest without incident, but the woke district attorneys decide the suspect was not worth the time and controversy of prosecuting or find that the police acted in a way that might be suspect or at least alienate a jury of the suspect’s peers. Therefore, the arrested is released—omnis effusus labor; or

4) they safely arrest the suspect without incident. The state successfully indicts and prosecutes the accused. And if he is found guilty, he is incarcerated to protect society and to pay for his crimes.

In these revolutionary times, I think plenty of police officers—if they still have career choices and can afford temporary financial losses—will make the necessary adjustments. So they will decide that the odds of scenarios one through three are as great or greater than number four.

Therefore they will quit, retire, or move to rural, mostly crime-free jurisdictions. Or if not, they simply will not respond promptly to 911 calls from high-crime areas, and perhaps suggest that other police, those less likely to inspire community wrath, go in their stead. 

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Accessories to evil The US and EU are conniving at murderous violence against Israeli Jews Melanie Phillips

By on May 10th, 2021

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/accessories-to-evil?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjox

Jerusalem tonight is very tense, with the planned Jewish celebrations of Jerusalem Day on Monday provoking fears of a further escalation of the recent violence that has been erupting in the city and which has rippled into attacks against southern Israel.

In the last few days, there have been violent Arab riots around Temple Mount, the Jerusalem religious site sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims; on Saturday night, a rocket was fired into southern Israel from Gaza, and two more were launched from there on Sunday; and incendiary balloons are once again also being fired from Gaza to attack Israeli civilians, their property and farmland, causing on Sunday some 39 fires, mainly in open areas. 

On Friday, around 200 Arabs and 17 Israeli police officers were wounded when hundreds of Arabs rioted on Temple Mount. There were reports that, once again, the Al Aqsa mosque on the site was being used to store ammunition to use against Israelis.

On Saturday night, clashes continued around Temple Mount causing some 90 Arab injuries while Arabs rioted along the Gaza border fence with Israel, burning tyres and throwing explosives at Israeli troops before being dispersed by tear gas.

Times of Israel reported yesterday: 

The central committee of Fatah, the movement led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, warned Saturday night that “the continuation of the settler attacks on the holy places and the homes of Palestinian residents, their expulsion and expansion of settlements — will lead to an all-out conflict in all the Palestinian territories.”

According to Channel 12, current discourse in the Palestinian street is of a “war for Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.” The network also said Hamas is encouraging its West Bank operatives to carry out attacks there and inflame tensions.

In Britain and America, this is being mostly reported as Palestinian “resistance” to Israeli attempts to evict some 70 Palestinians Arabs from the contentious east Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah — protests that have been met by what is being presented as brutal and heavy-handed reaction by Israeli security forces. Some seven Palestinians were injured in clashes there late on Sunday.

This media narrative is wickedly selective, twisted and misleading. The Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which is currently in progress, is always a time of heightened tension. This has been deliberately stoked up this year through Palestinian incitement to violence, a situation exacerbated in turn by militant Jewish nationalists — and with the fuel to this murderous Arab fire supplied by none other than the White House. 

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

For Some Arabs, Preventing Peace with Israel Is More Important Than Combating Coronavirus by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on May 10th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17248/arabs-preventing-peace-israel

The project sounds like the type of assistance that Jordanian women need, especially during this difficult period of the economic and health crises in their country.

What particularly irritated the anti-normalization activists and groups in Jordan was that some of the Jordanian women appeared in a video praising the project and talking about how happy they were to join forces with their Israeli neighbors on the other side of the border.

This Jordanian writer [Mohammed Sweidan] has taken it upon himself to be the spokesman for all women in his country. He claims to have some special knowledge of their actual intentions. Notably, he did not even bother to contact the Jordanian women to ask them about their attitude toward the joint project with the Israeli women.

These [Arab] leaders and media have filled the Arab people with so much hate against Israel that participating in a positive, productive endeavor becomes a major crime.

As long as such incitement against Israel in the Arab world continues, any talk about peace will be a pipe dream with hopes going up in smoke.

Hatred for Israel (and Jews) in many Arab countries continues to take priority over economic, health and political problems. Some Arabs prefer to dedicate more time and energy to combating peace with Israel than to dealing with the deadly fallout of COVID-19 in their own backyards.

Jordan, an Arab country that signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, is no exception.

On March 31, Jordan reported 111 COVID-related deaths, the highest daily toll since the outbreak of the pandemic. The report came as some Jordanians took to the streets to protest the government’s failed policies, especially in healthcare and the economy.

Instead of focusing their efforts on trying to find solutions to the severe medical crisis in the country, many Jordanians are busy condemning a meeting between Jordanian and Israeli women. These aggrieved Jordanians are dubbing the meeting an act of treason and calling for a commission of inquiry into the encounter.

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