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June 2021

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Congressional Black Caucus Is Blocking A Black Republican From Joining The Group Kadia Goba

By on June 11th, 2021

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kadiagoba/byron-donalds-congressional-black-caucus-membership

Rep. Byron Donalds, who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election win, hasn’t heard back from the powerful CBC.

The Congressional Black Caucus is blocking membership to Rep. Byron Donalds, a Republican from Florida who has tried to join the organization, a source familiar with the CBC’s plans told BuzzFeed News.

It’s been six months since the members who won election in 2020 were inducted into the CBC, a powerful and nominally nonpartisan group of Black lawmakers in Congress. Donalds, who won election for the first time last year, has not been included in that group.

The Florida representative’s office said Donalds has talked to at least three members of the CBC about joining the group, whose members are now at the forefront of police reform talks and responsible for highlighting the racial inequities around COVID-19. He’s not received an answer and the likelihood of that happening a quarter way into the 117th Congress looks bleak.

“Congressman Donalds has expressed interest in joining the CBC, but has yet to receive an official invitation,” said a Donalds aide. “If given, he’d gladly accept.” The CBC did not respond to questions about the status of Donalds’ membership, or why he was not being let in.

The snub highlights the divide between Democrats and their Republican counterparts since Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol during the certification of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Some Democrats have refused to partner with Republicans on legislation since the mob attack, especially if they voted against accepting the election results. Donalds was one of the Republicans who voted to deny Biden’s win.

The caucus has a history with Black Republican members of Congress. Sen. Tim Scott, arguably the most powerful Black Republican lawmaker right now, declined an invitation from the group in 2010 when he was first elected to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Is a bogus Iran deal upstaging the Abraham Accords? By Ruthie Blum

By on June 11th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/is-a-bogus-iran-deal-upstaging-the-abraham-accords-opinion-670725

Testifying before a Senate committee on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken danced around the issue of indirect negotiations in Vienna over a renewal of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran from which former US president Donald Trump withdrew in 2018.

“I would anticipate that even in the event of a return to compliance with the JCPOA, hundreds of sanctions will remain in place, including sanctions imposed by the Trump administration,” he said, hastily adding, “If they are not inconsistent with the JCPOA, they will remain unless and until Iran’s behavior changes.”

However, he acknowledged, “We don’t know at this stage whether Iran is willing and able to do what it would need to do to come back into compliance.”

America’s top diplomat may have caused news outlets around the world to highlight what could have been misconstrued as a hard-line stance toward the regime in Tehran, but he wasn’t fooling anybody else, least of all the ayatollahs. The very fact that he referred to an Iranian “return to compliance” to the deal it never upheld is sufficient cause for them to hold their ground and allow the West to grovel. You know, just as it did when Barack Obama was in the White House and intent on reaching the disastrous agreement in the first place.

It’s important to note that Blinken’s remarks came a day after International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi bemoaned the Islamic Republic’s refusal to cooperate with him on anything related to nuclear activity.

“I reiterate the requirement for Iran to clarify and resolve these issues without further delay by providing information, documentation and answers to the agency’s questions,” he told the IAEA Board of Governors. “The lack of progress in clarifying the agency’s questions concerning the correctness and completeness of Iran’s safeguards declarations seriously affects the ability of the agency to provide assurance of the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program.”

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HISTORY Comments turned off

A House That Has Done What a House Should Do: A Tribute to a Great American by Lawrence Kadish

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17453/alfred-joyce-kilmer

National leadership is meant to reside in the White House, capable of providing America with a shared vision that allows democracy and its citizens to thrive and flourish. And yet this White House may mirror the darkness that Kilmer mourns.

Kilmer knew what he was fighting for. He insisted on leading multiple patrols that put him in harm’s way. He wore the uniform of the “Fighting 69th” because he was a patriot who embraced American exceptionalism before the world even knew that a world power founded on freedom had been born.

He was an American doughboy killed by a German sniper in the closing months of World War I, defending freedom, literally on the front lines.

Sergeant Alfred Joyce Kilmer left behind a wife and five children. He also left behind a library of poetry that still speaks to us at a time of political turmoil and deep division within a country; a nation that remains the world’s last best hope for a cause that Kilmer courageously died for.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

This Isn’t Your Father’s Left-Wing Revolution Today’s revolutionaries aren’t fighting “the Man”—they are “the Man.” By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 10th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/09/this-isnt-your-fathers-left-wing-revolution/

Starry-eyed radicals in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed that they either were going to take over America or destroy it. 

One of their favorite psychodramatic mottos was “Change it or Lose it,” even as protests focused on drugs, music, race, class, sex, fashion—and almost anything and everything. 

Sixties radicals tutored America on long hair, wire-rim eyeglasses, and who was a drag, a square, a bummer, and who was hip, cool, groovy, mellow, and far out. Most of these silly revolutionaries were not unhinged Weathermen killers or SDS would-be Communists, but just adolescents along for the good-time ride.

With the end of the draft in 1972, the winding down of the Vietnam War, the oil embargoes, and the worsening economy, the ’60s revolution withered away. Cynics claimed the “revolution” was always mostly about middle-class students with long hair, kicking back during the peak of the postwar boom, indulging their appetites, and ensuring they would not end up in Vietnam. 

It is not even true that the ’60s at least ensured needed reform. The civil rights movement and equal rights for women and gays were already birthed before the hippies, as were folk songs, and early rock music. 

Instead, what the ’60s revolution did was accelerate these trends—but also radicalize, manipulate, and coarsen them. 

The grasping “yuppies” of the 1980s were the natural successors to let-it-all-hang-out hippies. The ’60s were at heart a narcissistic free-for-all when “freedom” often entailed self-indulgence and avoiding responsibility. 

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Is the Biden Administration Helping Iran to Achieve Its Nuclear Dream? by Con Coughlin

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17454/iran-biden-nuclear-dream

The improvement in Iran’s technical ability to develop nuclear weapons is the result of a number of steps Tehran has taken during the past year to increase its nuclear activity, all of which constitute clear violations of the terms Tehran agreed under the JCPOA.

Consequently, if the predictions are correct and Raisi emerges triumphant in the presidential elections [June 18], the prospects of the hardliners making any tangible concessions over the country’s nuclear programme will be negligible…. [Raisi] made his name during as a prominent member of Iran’s notorious Death Commissions, when opposition activists were either executed or sent to clear minefields during the Iran-Iraq war.

As a result, the only achievement of Mr Obama’s deeply-flawed nuclear deal with Iran will have been to enable the ayatollahs to achieve their dream of acquiring nuclear weapons, with all the implications that will have for the future security of the globe.

The most likely outcome of US President Joe Biden’s ill-considered attempt to revive the nuclear deal with Iran is that it will lead to a dramatic reduction in the time frame Tehran requires to build an atomic warhead.

One of the central goals of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) struck with Iran by former US President Barack Obama was to delay Tehran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons for more than a decade.

At the time the deal was agreed in 2015, intelligence experts predicted it would take it Iran about one year to develop the technological know-how to develop a nuclear warhead if Iran was allowed to continue with its nuclear activities.

In an attempt to slow Iran’s research into nuclear weapons, the JCPOA required Tehran to eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium, cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%, and reduce by about two-thirds the number of its gas centrifuges for 13 years. For the next 15 years, Iran would only enrich uranium up to 3.67%.

Yet, despite the JCPOA being in force for nearly six years, the latest estimates suggest that Iran is only a matter of months away from having the ability to produce sufficient quantities of weapons-grade uranium for one nuclear warhead.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey’s Erdogan Whips Up Antisemitism by Uzay Bulut

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17435/turkey-erdogan-antisemitism

“Anywhere which was connected with these people or with these prophets who were all Muslims becomes a Muslim territory…. So any place like this [Israel] had to be freed…. had to be liberated. So, Islam appeared… from their point of view — as a liberator. And therefore, there is no Islamic occupation…. So, there is no Islamic occupation. There is only Islamic liberation.” — Moshe Sharon, Professor Emeritus of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, YouTube, September 10, 2015.

Such accusations are, of course, totally false, but imagine how many ignorant people worldwide they infect with violent Jew-hatred.

In reality, both Muslim Arabs and Ottomans violently invaded Jerusalem and remained occupiers there for centuries.

What actually needs to be condemned is Hamas’s terrorism. It is Hamas that aims to destroy Israel, that commits war crimes, and that attempts genocide… as seen, for example, in Article 7 of the Hamas Charter. Moreover, it is Hamas that harms its own people and puts them in danger, and uses them as human shields: an additional war crime. Hamas has made no secret of advocating the use of civilians as human shields.

Erdogan’s offer to change the administration of Jerusalem is an open assault on the sovereignty and security of Israel. The three religions are already present and enjoy religious liberty in Jerusalem, unlike the tiny, dying non-Muslim community in Turkey…. Erdogan also issued a threat — his word — to Jerusalem if he does not get his way….

A major reason for this Jew-hatred appears to be irresponsible leaders who repeat hateful propaganda while remaining completely blind to, or proud of, their own crimes.

As Hamas indiscriminately bombed Israeli cities from May 11 to May 17, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered a speech in Ankara in which he targeted both Israel and Jews with antisemitic slurs. Erdogan disseminated countless falsehoods that misinformed the Turkish public about Israel, the Jewish people, Gaza, and other issues — all the while fanning the flames of antisemitism.

In discussing the Islamic history of Jerusalem, where the Jews were living for more than a thousand years before Islam even appeared with Mohammad (c. 570-632) — and scooping up ancient Jewish leaders on the way:

“Jerusalem… is a region that hosts the most ancient settlements of humanity. Many prophets who were also our prophets, from Prophet Abraham to Prophet David and Prophet Solomon, lived in these lands and left their marks on these lands.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A peer-reviewed psychoanalytic journal publishes a grotesque anti-White screed By Andrea Widburg

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/a_peerreviewed_psychoanalytic_journal_publishes_a_grotesque_antiwhite_screed.html

Critical Race Theory reared its ugly head in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association when Donald Ross, a San Francisco-based psychoanalyst (and teacher) shared with the world the fact that “whiteness” is a “malignant, parasitic-like condition.” One of his colleagues was also good enough to offer an approving review in the same issue.

The American Psychoanalytic Association is a real organization, founded in 1911 and has over 3,000 members. It also publishes the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (“JAPA”).

In its most recent edition, JAPA published a peer-reviewed article by Donald Moss, who is White. In 2017, Moss received the Elisabeth Young-Bruehl award for work against prejudice.

Moss is currently a teacher at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He works to “understand and dismantle structured forms of hatred– ‘hating in the first person plural’–racism, homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia.” (And yes, that quoted sentence is gibberish.)

You’ll find more gibberish in Moss’s JAPA article, entitled “On Having Whiteness.” However, gibberish or not, anyone can grasp the racial hatred. According to the abstract:

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure

To appreciate how utterly vile and insane this is, substitute the words “Black” or “Jew” in place of White, and you’ll be reading something that would be perfectly at home in the Journal of the American Nazi Society or the Annals of the KKK. Moss’s affiliation happens to be with the “Green Gang,” which targets “hatred” toward the “natural world.” (Whites apparently aren’t natural.)

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Social Media Blitz Exposes Campus Racism Triggered by Critical Race Theory Rooting out the new racism espoused by the radical Left. Sara Dogan

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/tonight-social-media-blitz-exposes-campus-racism-sara-dogan/

A cutting-edge social media campaign conducted in April and May by the David Horowitz Freedom Center targeted and exposed the racist and segregationist actions and programming of prestigious colleges and universities taken under the guise of “anti-racism” and Critical Race Theory. Ten prestigious institutions of higher education including Harvard University, the University of Southern California, Georgetown University, and the University of Minnesota were outed for their racist leanings and decisions.  

The universities targeted by the Freedom Center’s campaign were included among the “Most Racist” for varied reasons, but the unifying theme was their allegiance to the new philosophy of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a radical revision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that each American be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While Dr. King and the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s promoted “colorblindness,” CRT pushes the opposite view, that our character and our place in society is predetermined by our skin color.

As Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo explained recently in an interview with The Atlantic, “Critical race theorists believe that American institutions, such as the Constitution and legal system, preach freedom and equality, but are mere ‘camouflages’ for naked racial domination. They believe that racism is a constant, universal condition: it simply becomes more subtle, sophisticated, and insidious over the course of history. In simple terms, critical race theory reformulates the old Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of White and Black. But the basic conclusions are the same: in order to liberate man, society must be fundamentally transformed through moral, economic, and political revolution.”

Guided by this ahistorical revolutionary subtext, America’s colleges and universities have increasingly promoted racially-segregated classes and “anti-racist” training programs which actually endorse racist tropes and promote racial conflict.  To combat this return to Jim Crow, the Freedom Center published a report and created a new website, TopTenRacistUniversities.org, exposing the Top Ten Most Racist Colleges and Universities in America. The social media campaign served to highlight this report and its conclusions and bring them to a wider audience.

Harvard University, #1 on the Freedom Center’s list of most racist universities, was sued for blatant discrimination against Asian applicants in spite of their superior academic achievements, made possible by characterizing their personalities as “lacking” and “one dimensional.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Canada to Fight ‘Far-Right’ Groups After ‘Terrorist Attack’ That Killed Four Muslims Politicizing a tragedy. Christine Douglass-Williams

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/canada-fight-far-right-groups-after-terrorist-christine-douglass-williams/

Four members of a London, Ontario Muslim family were run over and killed by a pickup truck last Sunday evening, while out on a leisurely walk. The youngest, a 9-year-old boy, suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries. Police Chief Steve Williams concluded “We believe the victims were targeted because of their Islamic faith,” sparking national fury over a hate-driven act that left a nation stunned and empathetic.

The fact that five members of a family, comprising three generations, could be run over in this horrific manner because of their faith strikes at the core of civilization, but let’s be clear: Western civilization — where all human life is valued.

What is troubling about the reaction to this case is the speedy politicization of it, revealing just how low politicians are willing to stoop to exploit a profound tragedy for their own agendas. Indeed, Prime Minster Justin Trudeau quickly vowed to hunt down what he deemed to be “far right” groups — a “project” that he started a long time ago. What is highly disturbing is that Trudeau has absolutely zero evidence regarding the political leanings of  20-year-old Nathaniel Veltman — who has been charged with four counts of murder and one of attempted murder.

Reuters reported that Veltman isn’t known to belong to any hate group. The local mayor, meanwhile, called the deaths “mass murder, perpetrated against Muslims,” casting Canada as a country where Muslims are in danger everywhere.

This tragedy highlighted a troubling quality about some members of Canada’s leadership — who didn’t hesitate to manipulate the tragedy, thus harnessing a climate of mob rule and bypassing due process. From front-line police “commentary” right up to the Prime Minister — who is using this tragedy to continue hunting down “far right” groups — a pattern is now set in motion, and it will be surely exploited further by special interest lobbies comprising the red-green axis. 

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Gender Studies Faculty Sides With Hamas Facts and history are not the concern of the morally-elevated professoriate. Richard L. Cravatts

By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/gender-studies-faculty-side-hamas-richard-l-cravatts/

Seeming to give proof to Orwell’s observation that some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals, yet another group of academics—this time faculty in some 120 Gender Studies departments—has, after the latest conflict in Gaza, followed the lead of various student governments, faculty, and other academic organizations by launching yet another attack in the cognitive war against Israel.

With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, a “solidarity statement” issued by the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) pretentiously announced that “as gender studies departments in the United States, we are the proud benefactors of decades of feminist anti-racist, and anti-colonial activism that informs the foundation of our interdiscipline.” 

“We center global social justice in our intersectional teaching, scholarship, and organizing.,” these moral termagants continued.  “From Angela Davis we understand that justice is indivisible; we learn this lesson time and again from Black, Indigenous, Arab, and most crucially, Palestinian feminists, who know that ‘Palestine is a Feminist Issue.’”

Palestine may be a feminist issue in the addled minds of these academics, but, tellingly, they conveniently make no mention in their statement of the terrorist group Hamas which is singularly responsible for initiating this latest clash with Israel and which commits a war crime each time its militants launch a rocket toward civilian neighborhoods with the intention of murdering Jews. And while these gender studies activists seem so concerned for the emotional and physical welfare of Palestinian women, they do not mention any Israeli women in their statement or commiserate with the reality of living with a genocidal enemy at one’s border. They do not mention mothers of children in southern Israeli towns like Sderot, a frequent Hamas target, where bedrooms have been converted to bomb shelters, residents sometimes have only 15 seconds to seek cover from incoming rockets, and over 40 percent of the town’s children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of living with the specter of terrorism and possible death clouding daily life.

And, apparently, their virtue-signaling mission to realize “global social justice in [their] intersectional teaching, scholarship, and organizing” has not enabled these gender studies faculty to notice the injustice and violence currently being meted out against Israelis, either as a result of the shower of some 4300 Hamas rockets launched from Gaza in the latest assault with the intention of murdering Jewish civilians, or as part of an ongoing intifada which has claimed the lives of  Israelis who have been injured and murdered by psychopathic Palestinians wielding knives, guns, rocks, incendiary kites, and even automobiles used as weapons.

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