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May 2022

Anti-CRT Conservative PACs Dominate Texas School Board Elections By Luca Cacciatore

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/critical-race-theory-school-board-elections-2022-texas/2022/05/09/id/1069152/

Candidates backed by conservative political action committees (PACs) swept Texas school board elections held on Saturday, as last year’s nationwide pushback against critical race theory materializes into on-the-ground victories.

Among the big winners was the 1776 Project PAC, a group that defines itself as forwarding those who “want to reform our public education system by promoting patriotism and pride in American history.”

All 15 candidates endorsed by the PAC won their races across six school districts representing suburban Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, the group announced through Twitter.

“The election victories are evidence parents are still motivated to transform public education,” 1776 Project founder Ryan Girdusky told Newsmax on Monday. “For decades, conservatives sat out of these important elections – and we’re happy that the 1776 Project PAC could play a small part in these victories.”

Biden’s Disinformation Board is a Gift to Republicans | Charles Lipson

https://www.newsweek.com/bidens-disinformation-board-gift-republicans-opinion-1704256

If you worked really hard, you might be able to come up with an idea as unappealing as a government disinformation board. Voters already distrust the government and are especially concerned about its excessive intrusion and unchecked regulatory power.

If you worked even harder, you might find as bad a person to lead it as Nina Jankowicz, a self-styled “disinformation expert” whose real specialty seems to be spreading disinformation to support her left-wing views.

If you tried hard to justify this mess, you might come up with a defender as ineffective as Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security. The secretary, already in deep trouble because of the porous southern border, faced a hostile Senate hearing and admitted he knew nothing about Ms. Jankowicz’s dismal history of ideological fulminations and partisan statements. He refused to say whose bright idea it was to hire her—only that he was clueless about her background. Still, Mayorkas refused to apologize, refused to replace her and refused to back down from creating this ill-conceived (and ill-defined) board.

If you did all these things, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has, you would be committing political malpractice. You would be mocking the Constitution’s fundamental protection of free speech, encoded in the First Amendment. Although a few ideologues might applaud you, you would hear only groans from moderate Democrats running for reelection. This ill-conceived board would lash them, at their peril, to a high-profile effort to monitor private speech, conducted by a very unpopular administration. That’s dangerous constitutionally and incompetent politically.

Why ‘Harvard Crimson’ BDS support demands our attention Why do so many Jewish 18-year-olds begin their university studies with the pro-Israel sentiments they learned at home, then emerge four years later more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause? By Moshe Phillips

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-706074

The news that The Harvard Crimson newspaper issued an editorial in support of the BDS campaign to boycott Israel has surprised many in part because a Crimson editor had been active on social media stating how proud she is as a Jew to have had a part in the publishing of the editorial. We hear a lot about Jewish college students who have become pro-Palestinian. We know about polls showing that younger American Jews are much less connected to Israel than their parents.

How can this trend be explained? Why do so many Jewish 18-year-olds begin their university studies with the pro-Israel sentiments they learned at home, then emerge four years later more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than to Israel?

At least part of the answer to this question can be found in a recent essay by a retiring professor of Israeli and Middle Eastern history at another of the eight Ivy League institutions, the University of Pennsylvania (Penn).

More than 30 years, Ian Lustick taught about Israel to many members of the large Jewish student body at Penn. The total number of Jewish students who took his courses was at least many hundreds, perhaps thousands. He lectured to them every day, assigned their readings and answered their questions. He organized discussion groups, symposia and summer trips to Israel. When it came to Israel and the Arabs, Ian Lustick was their authority figure.

Reflecting on his recent retirement in the latest issue of the Penn Jewish Studies newsletter, Ian Lustick explained what he set out to do in his academic career and how he did it.

Will NATO Fight? by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18514/will-nato-fight

If NATO blood would in fact be spilt should Russia invade Poland or the Baltic states, why have we utterly rejected the prospect of spilling it to help protect Ukraine from Putin’s mass killings, torture, rape and destruction? Ukraine is not a NATO member and NATO states have no treaty obligation to come to its defence as they do to each other. But that is surely just a technicality, a few lines on a page. There is no practical or moral difference between protecting a friend who is a member of the alliance and one who is not.

[I]f nuclear terror applies to Ukraine, why doesn’t it apply to any NATO country that becomes the target of Russian military aggression? Why would NATO leaders fear Putin’s nukes any less if he takes a bite out of Poland or the Baltic states? The reality is, if it is true that NATO could not risk intervention over Ukraine for fear of Russian nuclear retaliation, it could not risk intervention over, say, Latvia for the same reason.

On top of that, every country in the West has capitulated to a concerted and systematic assault on its history, its virtue and its self-worth. Past glories are denigrated because they are not in line with 21st century wokeism… Governments, including defence and foreign ministries, the very people that must lead any fight against Russian attack, have succumbed to this sickness to the extent that even they abrogate their own past and repudiate their own present.

Meanwhile, in pursuit of a superstate, the European Union and its cheerleaders have been doing their level best to openly undermine and cancel national or patriotic spirit in member countries…

Can we expect Europeans to fight and die for countries whose histories and modern sense of worth have been roundly denounced and condemned by their own leaders?

No such feeling exists for the EU even as it seeks to replace national loyalty. Allegiance to Brussels is transactional and in only one direction. People ask not what they can do for the EU but what the EU can do for them. Of course many of our young people would fight for their country — with as much courage and commitment as their ancestors ever did — and we witness this whenever we send them into battle. But when the time comes to expand our forces, how many more will answer the call after being educated to despise their own country and the very notion of fighting for it?

If somehow the political and popular will to defend NATO member states did materialise, what would European countries fight with? Constantly expanding social welfare programmes have driven the military out of the marketplace across the continent.

While he remains in the Kremlin, Putin’s objective is the neutralisation of NATO. He knows that the alliance’s failure to fight for its own under his provocation would spell its final humiliation and signal the end of the US-led world order. For the liberty, prosperity and security of future generations, this cannot be allowed to happen.

This is not a rehearsal; it is a foretaste of the far greater threat that will be coming from President Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party.

Great Britain is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public enemy number one. In March the Kremlin branded UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson the most active anti-Russian leader. A few days ago on television, Putin’s propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov fancifully suggested Russia should drown Britain in a radioactive tsunami created by Poseidon nuclear torpedos that would leave survivors in “a radioactive desert, unfit for anything for a very long time”.

The Doctrine of American Unexceptionalism The Biden administration believes that soft power is smart and hard power is dumb. Our allies are paying the price. Michael Doran

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-doctrine-of-american-unexceptionalism?token=

Russian leader Vladimir Putin was supposed to have used his Victory Day speech yesterday to reveal his intentions regarding the Ukraine war. Russia watchers expected him to define his aims, signaling a prolonged conflict or, possibly, a path to peace. As it turned out, Putin did neither. His war against Ukraine drags on.

But although this week failed to clarify the future of the war in Europe, there is still a small chance that it will offer us some clarity on another front: Iran’s ongoing efforts to build a nuclear arsenal. Enrique Mora, the European Union’s Iran nuclear talks coordinator, is visiting Tehran today, May 10, seeking to break the deadlock in the negotiations between Iran and the United States. His mission might teach us whether Tehran has decided to cut a deal with President Biden. Chances are, however, that we will end the week as much in the dark about Tehran’s intentions as we are about Putin’s.

To help us understand why, I turn to Michael Doran, the author of today’s essay. Doran sees a connection between the way the Biden administration has approached both the Ukraine war and the conflict with Iran. Namely: in both cases the White House has profoundly weakened America’s diplomatic hand by shying away from traditional deterrence.

Doran has never gone along with the crowd. He first came on my radar in 2005, after what we would now call “woke” professors mobilized against his bid for tenure at Princeton. I liked him immediately.

He has a knack for writing topical articles that age well. His 2002 Foreign Affairs article on Osama bin Laden, “Somebody Else’s Civil War,” remains one of the best things written on al-Qaeda and radical Islam. When his 2015 piece, “Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy,” first came out, Doran’s view about Obama’s eagerness to please Iran was controversial. It’s now common wisdom. And last year, when Biden took office, he co-authored a piece in Tablet Magazine, “The Realignment,” which predicted that President Biden would zealously follow Obama’s Middle East playbook.

Today’s essay tries to make sense of this administration’s baffling foreign policy strategy, which seems to offer succor toward our enemies, like Iran and China, while isolating allies in the Gulf and Israel. As Doran explains, this is not borne out of incompetence, but out of a deeply held ideology about the trajectory of America and the West. — BW

A MIDGE DECTER SAMPLER

https://www.nysun.com/article/a-midge-decter-sampler?utm_content=The%20Evening%20Sun%3A%20Taliban%20

Following is a sampler of writing by Midge Decter, who died Monday at the age of 94:

— from “Belittling Sholom Aleichem’s Jews,” Commentary, 1954:

“The truth is that ghetto Jewry was not pleased with itself at all. If it could be humorous, that was because it was sitting on a keg of spiritual dynamite and had no other way to protect itself against the big explosion. American Jews can afford to be pleased by the ghetto. Time and distance and indifference have settled most of its conflicts for us. And even we can only enjoy the ghetto by retroactively making of it something it was not quite: a new Jewish folk tradition.”

— from “A Commentary Report: Women at Work,” Commentary, 1961:

“The question of why it is that the American women can find it preferable to do any amount of routine drudgery on some assembly line or behind some sales counter rather than involve herself in all the physical details of caring for her husband and children has become a matter of grave concern to observers of American society — and even to herself. For her new pattern of living is undoubtedly plunging this country into a domestic crisis of major proportions, from which it will emerge with a good number of traditional family arrangements no longer intact.”

— from “The Strangely Polite ‘Dr. Strangelove,’” Commentary, 1964:

“‘Dr. Strangelove’ makes no overt political gestures in the end, but it does make a few covert ones. Indeed, for a work that so obviously regards itself, and that has been so readily taken, as a radical disruption of the going complacencies, ‘Dr. Strangelove’ is strangely polite in its choice of enemies: Jack D. Ripper is not only crazy, he is right-wing crazy; Buck Turgidson is not only sappy, he is sappy on the side of established military power; and the mad scientist, Dr. Strangelove, is a Nazi. No liberals are ridiculed in this ‘anarchic’ movie, unless one considers President Muffley a liberal, and even then he comes off relatively well. Nor was Kubrick quite daring enough to have risked portraying his nuclear strategist as a Jew — not a Nazi, but a refugee, in fact, from Hitler, as so many real-life nuclear strategists are.”

Biden’s Jerusalem itinerary, White House meeting with Abdullah concern Israelis

https://www.urshalimvoice.com/bidens-jerusalem-itinerary-white-house-meeting-with-abdullah-concern-israelis/

U.S. President Joe Biden’s expected White House meeting this week with Jordanian King Abdullah over the Temple Mount and a proposed visit to eastern Jerusalem without an Israeli escort on his first trip to the 

country since coming into office,could symbolize a change in U.S. policy that concerns Israelis.

The Jordanian monarch is arriving in Washington Monday. The meeting with the president will focus in part on the recent flare-up of violence at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and on attempts to reduce the subsequent 

Palestinian-Israeli tensions, a senior Jordanian official told Walla News.

Pushing their self-proclaimed role as “custodians” of the holy site, Jordanian leaders blamed Israel for police measures taken to prevent Palestinian rioters from injuring visitors to the Mount and below at the 

Western Wall. They publicized a list of demands, including that the Jordanian-funded Waqf (Islamic trust) administrators on the Mount should be in charge of security instead of the Israeli police and be given the right to pre-approve non-Muslim visitors.

According to a government readout of a call Biden made to Abdullah during the Ramadan violence last month, he “recognized the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s role as the custodian of Muslim holy places in Jerusalem” and called for preservation of the “status quo” on the Mount.

Israeli leaders have pushed back and said only Israel would decide what happens in their capital.

Taliban Afghanistan Keeps Getting Worse Americans still can’t get out as restrictions on women increase.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-keeps-getting-worse-burqa-mandate-special-visa-interpreters-biden-blinken-women-rights-

Though it gets little Western coverage these days, Afghanistan continues to regress. On Saturday the ruling Taliban ordered all women to fully cover themselves in public. This is a tragedy for the women and men of Afghanistan, and it’s a reminder of the nightmare for the Americans still trapped there.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently testified on Capitol Hill that 126 Americans remain in Afghanistan. He added that 37 seek to leave and are being assisted by the State Department. A congressional source told us that the figure may underestimate the number of U.S. citizens who want to get out, as some want to leave but need to get their affairs in order first.

Mr. Blinken noted that the U.S. had helped more than 600 American citizens leave the country since the end of August, but hundreds have come forward since the panicked withdrawal ended. The process has been uneven: Some freedom-of-movement issues are resolved, then others spring up. Leaving the country remains difficult.

The Administration vows to assist any Americans who want to leave. But that is the least it can do after the rushed retreat and the casual approach to evacuations that preceded it.