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June 2021

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Diplomats Abase America The State Department is supposed to advance U.S. interests and burnish the country’s image abroad. By Dave Seminara

By on June 1st, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/diplomats-abase-america-11622494456?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

American diplomats take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. A foreign-service officer’s job is to advance American interests. But officials are now asking diplomats to function as social-justice warriors to the detriment of the country’s image abroad, as revealed by a leaked State Department cable encouraging embassies and consulates to fly Black Lives Matter flags.

Nearly 20 years ago, when I was sworn in as a foreign-service officer by Secretary of State Colin Powell, he said: “The most important of all the jobs that we are sending you out to do is to take with you the value system of the American people.” BLM’s values are shared by only half the country, if that, according to a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll. Another USA Today survey indicated that only 18% of Americans and 28% of blacks support the group’s signature goal, defunding the police.

Yet from reading the State Department’s May 21 cable, you’d think the country is in lockstep agreement. The cable asserts that protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing “sparked a movement to confront systems perpetuating deep-seated inequities rooted in colonialism and the oppression of racial, tribal, ethnic, and other minority communities.” It continues: “Mr. Floyd’s murder prompted an international outcry to seek racial justice and equity by dismantling systemic racism and eradicating police brutality affecting communities of color, most acutely, people of African descent.” The missive asserted that federal law allows diplomats to “engage in BLM-related activity while on duty or in the workplace” but not to combine such advocacy with “political activity.”

That’s doublespeak. BLM activity is political advocacy. The group’s co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors is a self-described Marxist. Until recently, BLM’s website called on “comrades” to make efforts at “dismantling cisgender privilege and heteronormative thinking” and “disrupting the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Twilight of the Netanyahu Era? Israel may get a new government, but don’t expect a left turn.

By on June 1st, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twilight-of-the-netanyahu-era-11622495465?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Western democracies produce all manner of governments: Left- or right-wing, centrist, populist. But the new government taking shape in Israel defies categorization. If negotiations go through as planned, Israel could soon be led by a religious-nationalist Prime Minister backed by a centrist dealmaker, with the support of Arab and leftist parties.

American liberals will surely celebrate the departure of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has come to symbolize the Democratic Party’s rift with Israel over the last decade. But it would be a mistake to interpret it as a rejection of Israel’s rightward political and security direction, which the new government is likely to maintain.

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The unusual coalition is coming together after Israelis went to the polls four times since 2019, most recently this March. Though his security policies had wide support, Mr. Netanyahu—who has been Prime Minister since 2009—was unable to form a majority coalition from among Israel’s 13 fractious parties.

The conventional wisdom this month said Hamas had given Mr. Netanyahu a new political lease on life by launching its rocket assault on Israel, elevating the security issue that built Mr. Netanyahu’s career. Yet a week after the fighting stopped, Naftali Bennett of the conservative Yamina party announced that he would accept an offer from the centrist Yair Lapid to form a government without Mr. Netanyahu. Under the agreement, Mr. Bennett will be Prime Minister immediately, with Mr. Lapid taking over in 2023, if the government lasts that long.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Racist Mayor: Lori Lightfoot Another Democrat carries the Left’s torch of hate. John Perazzo

By on June 1st, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/racist-mayor-lori-lightfoot-john-perazzo/

Shortly after 9 p.m. on the night of May 24, a 17-year-old black youth named Keyshawn Williams was standing on a sidewalk along Chicago’s South Oakley Boulevard when someone in a silver BMW opened fire and killed him in a drive-by shooting.

The night before that, a 25-year-old African American named Ladell Arnold was riding in a vehicle along West Flournoy Street in Chicago at 7:10 p.m. when he was shot and killed by a nearby gunman.

The night before that, a 46-year-old black man named Johnnie Williams was standing on a sidewalk along Chicago’s South Michigan Avenue at 7:30 p.m. when some people riding in two passing vehicles shot him dead while also wounding two others.

And at 11:50 p.m. the night before that, a 15-year-old black boy named Dajon Gater was on the front porch of a West Lexington Street house in Chicago, when two armed males approached and killed him with a gunshot to the head.

Like four tiny grains of sand among many thousands in an hourglass, the names of these four dead victims blend imperceptibly into the long list of African Americans whose lives in recent years have been snuffed out by other blacks in the killing field known as Chicago. During the past 12 months alone, more than 820 people have been victims of homicide in The Windy City. And most of them were blacks killed by other blacks.  

Of course, you’ve never before heard of any of the four individuals cited above – nor will you ever come across their names again – for the simple reason that none of their deaths can be traced to the actions of a white police officer – or to the actions of any white person at all, for that matter. Thus, there will be no Black Lives Matter protest marches held in their honor; no $25,000 celebrity-funded golden caskets eternally encasing their bodies in the grave; and no gaggle of reporters or “civil rights leaders” repeatedly recounting, with pained and pious countenances, the tragic stories of how these four individuals died, far too young, in America’s third largest city. No, the only words publicly memorializing these four people will be the names etched silently on their tombstones.

The chief political executive of the hell hole called Chicago is Lori Lightfoot, the latest in an unbroken, 90-year line of exclusively Democrat mayors extending all the way back to 1931. Under Lightfoot’s stewardship, homicides in Chicago increased by an astonishing 40 percent from 2019 to 2020 – a pattern that was seen in a host of Democrat-run cities after George Floyd’s death a year ago. And Chicago’s stratospheric homicide rate has continued well into 2021.

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