Displaying posts published in

September 2022

US’ diplomatic option and Iran’s child martyrdom – incompatible! Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/3eQDji5

*Is the diplomatic option viable when dealing with Iran’s Ayatollahs, who have promoted – since 1979 – child martyrdom in their school curriculum and on the battlefield?!

*Is the diplomatic option viable when dealing with Iran’s Ayatollahs, who have espoused child martyrdom in the service of their Islamic Revolution, which aims to topple all pro-US Arab Sunni regimes and bring “the Great American Satan” and other Western “infidels” to submission?!

*Is the diplomatic option viable when dealing with Iran’s Ayatollahs, who have urged Iranian children to participate in the annual November 13 “National Day of Fighting Arrogance” (commemorating the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran and holding over 50 Americans hostages for 444 days), declaring their hatred toward “the bullying and oppressive USA” and chanting “Death to America”?!

Luring children into mine-sweeping

Brainwashing children into martyrdom is presented by the Ayatollahs as an extension of the Shiite mythology surrounding the 680 AD Battle of Karbala, which was the Big Bang of the Sunni-Shiite conflict and the role model for martyrdom. During the battle, Hussain ibn Ali, the third Shia Imam and the grandson of Muhammad, and his warriors – including children – were betrayed and massacred by the Sunni Caliph Yazid.

“During the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran war, children were sent to be slaughtered on mine-sweeping missions…. Iranian officials forced underage Afghan refugees to fight in the Syrian civil war on the side of Bashar al-Assad’s government….”

According to the Geneva-based Refworld (an arm of the UN High Commissioner on Refugees), “[Iranian] child soldiers, some as young as nine, were used extensively during the Iran-Iraq war…. They were given ‘keys to paradise’ and promised that they would go directly to heaven if they died as martyrs against the Iraqi enemy….   

The Palestinians and the World Do Not Need Another Corrupt, Failed Terrorist Arab State by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18897/palestinians-corrupt-failed-terrorist-state

The truth, however, is that neither the Palestinian Authority leadership nor the Palestinian people is ready for statehood. And the responsibility for that fact lies squarely with the ruthless and failed Palestinian leaders.

The Palestinian bid to obtain UN recognition of a Palestinian state comes at a time when the PA appears to be losing control over some parts of the West Bank, where gunmen belonging to several groups have replaced the Palestinian security forces… [and] are responsible not only for terrorist attacks against Israel, but also the growing scenes of anarchy and lawlessness….

Abbas himself has long been praising and glorifying Palestinians who carry out terrorist attacks….

Abbas, who is unable (and unwilling) to rein in a few hundred gunmen in two major Palestinian cities in the West Bank, wants the United Nations, its member states and the rest of the world to believe that he is ready to run a state of his own.

If Abbas cannot send his officers to confiscate an M-16 rifle from an unruly gunman in Jenin or Nablus, how can he be trusted to prevent the future Palestinian state from turning into a launching pad for regional terrorism?

Abbas wants the UN to grant the Palestinians the status of full member state, but cannot provide any guarantees that the aspired-for state would not be turned into a terror entity that is armed and funded by Iran’s regime and its proxies.

Abbas wants the UN to recognize “Palestine” as a state when he literally has no control over half of the Palestinians… If Abbas dares to go to the Gaza Strip, Hamas will hang him at the entrance to the area on charges of “collaboration” with Israel.

Abbas is seeking full UN recognition at a time when he continues to block general elections for the PA, arrests and intimidates his political opponents, refuses to share power with other Palestinians and muzzles freedom of expression.

More than they need a state, the Palestinians need good leadership. They need to rid themselves of the corrupt leaders who have deprived them of international aid and led them from one disaster after the other since the early 1970s, when the PLO was expelled from Jordan for undermining the kingdom’s sovereignty.

[T]he Palestinians’ biggest tragedy by far has been failed leadership and more failed leadership. It radicalizes them toward Islamic fundamentalism and deprives them of elections, freedom of expression and international aid. The UN member states would be doing a great service to the Palestinians if they asked Abbas about the absence of freedom of speech and a functioning parliament under his regime.

They would also be doing the Palestinian people a huge service if they asked Abbas about torture in Palestinian Authority prisons and the continuing crackdown by his security forces on human rights activists and journalists. And they should definitely ask him what measures he has taken to end financial and administrative corruption in the PA.

These issues are more pressing for the Palestinians than another worthless document by the UN recognizing a fictitious Palestinian state that is already marked by the intrusion of other brutal radical Islamist dictatorships.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership has decided to renew its bid to gain full membership in the United Nations. PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who is scheduled to address the UN General Assembly during its session in New York later this month, is expected to raise the issue of upgrading the Palestinians’ status from non-member observer state to full member.

Green Globalism is the Ultimate Expression of White Supremacy Green globalists are proclaiming a planetary crisis to camouflage an agenda of conquest dominated by white Westerners. Green imperialism is still imperialism. By Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/12/green-globalism-is-the-ultimate-expression-of-white-supremacy/

There has been broad recognition of late that the American Left projects their own flawed proclivities onto their political opponents. They accuse the Right of not caring about the American worker, but the functional consequence of every policy they devise has been destructive to American workers. They accuse the Right of being corporate puppets, when every major corporate special interest caters to the Left. They accuse the Right of having no respect for the Constitution or the rule of law, while they attempt to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College, ignore the First and Second Amendments, and refuse to prosecute criminals. They accuse the Right of being fascist, yet their allies in Antifa and Black Lives Matter have cells operating in every major city.

Maybe the biggest projection of all is the common leftist accusation that the Right is dominated by white supremacists. The first thing to observe here is that the American Left – its leadership, its donors, and its corporate partners—“diversity, equity and inclusion” notwithstanding—is itself dominated by whites. And apart from their rhetoric, they certainly aren’t doing anything to help nonwhites. From welfare to affirmative action to avoidable cost-of-living increases, every policy the Left implements has the effect of disproportionately marginalizing and impoverishing nonwhites.

But are these white leaders on the Left supremacists? Yes, they are, because the American Left, and the globalist green agenda it is cramming down our throats, has only one logical ultimate goal: To conquer the world. It’s pretty hard to be more “supremacist” than that.

Recognizing this reality relies on fairly simple logic:

If life on Earth will come to an end unless all nations achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050, but so far the only nations attempting to achieve this goal are white Western nations, then to save the earth, those nations that are not complying must be forced to comply. In the short run, for example, this means preventing emerging nations from acquiring the investment and technical support to develop an energy economy based on fossil fuel. But within a decade or two, with another generation of Westerners reaching adulthood firmly convinced the world will come to an end if “net zero” is not achieved, the green agenda will be a marketable justification for world war.

When you are sick, do you want Dr Woke or Dr Smart? By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/when_you_are_sick_do_you_want_dr_woke_or_dr_smart.html

Medical school and postgraduate training is a long and arduous journey, often taking 8-10 years beyond college. There is much to learn, process and assimilate. Clinical judgement stems not only from experience but also from intelligence.

Medicine is a high stakes game. Sickness and health lie in the balance, as does life and death (or vision and blindness in my professional world of retina surgery). Medical errors can be due to accidents, incorrect judgement calls, or lack of knowledge.

When your health or life is on the line, you want the smartest physician caring for you, making critical decisions, or performing challenging surgery. I would want the best and the brightest caring for me. I am not as much concerned with my doctors’ bedside manner, wokeness, or social skills but rather that they be smart, capable, and competent.

Are woke doctors necessarily the smartest? If they are thinking more about proper pronouns and social justice, are they thinking less about blood tests and MRI findings?

YouTube screen grab CC BY 3.0 license

Dr Stanley Goldfarb is a physician-writer, like yours truly. He is “A board-certified kidney specialist, a former Professor and Associate Dean for Curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He has been widely published in medical journals, as well as The Wall Street Journal.”

Dr Goldfarb would be considered a “Dr Smart”. He founded an organization called “Do No Harm” with a mission to, “Protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology. We believe in making healthcare better for all – not undermining it in pursuit of a political agenda.”

He recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Post, calling out top medical schools for shifting from a hundred years of educating and training “Dr Smart” in favor of their new preferred student “Dr Woke”. His opening line, “Elite medical schools are deliberately recruiting woke activists, jeopardizing their mission of training physicians.”

The Prejudice that Never Dies From Fiamma Nirenstein, a powerful jeremiad on Jew-hatred. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-prejudice-that-never-dies/

A prolific journalist, media commentator, documentary producer, former Member of the Italian Parliament, and revered figure in Italy’s Jewish community (“she is our fiamma – our flame!” one Italian Jew told me years ago), Fiamma Nirenstein relocated to Israel nine years ago, where she currently serves as a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. She’s also written several books, the latest of which, Jewish Lives Matter: Human Rights and Anti-Semitism, has now been translated into English. Even if you don’t need to be told that anti-Semitism is evil, and even if you’ve read any number of works on the subject, you’d be wrong to take a pass on this one: Nirenstein is a brilliant, deeply informed student of Jew-hatred, and her new book – translated excellently from the Italian by Amy Rosenthal – is an elegant, passionate, and energetic distillation of her knowledge and wisdom, offering more than a few insights that, to me at least, are fresh and valuable.

For example, Nirenstein notes savvily that the kind of leftist professors who reflexively profess sympathy for peoples like New Zealand’s Maori, Australia’s aborigines, Canada’s First Nations, and Native Americans in the U.S. – routinely reminding the white residents of those countries that they’re living on stolen land and beginning every lecture at an academic conference by mentioning that the event in question is taking place on land once occupied by the Iroquois or Aranda or Tutchone tribe – are the very same people who hate Israel the most, even though you’d think that if they prized consistency they’d cheer the return, in 1947, of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah – which in the intervening centuries had been conquered in turn by (among others) the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks – to the descendants of their original inhabitants. As Nirenstein puts it, which tribal group could be a more archetypal example of “aboriginal people who returned home” than the Jews?

Yeshiva University Case Means We’re All Jews Now Every American has a stake in upholding the school’s right to free exercise.By William McGurn

https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-all-jews-now-supreme-court-free-exercise-yeshiva-university-lgbtq-student-club-judaism-pride-emergency-petition-11663016097?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

In mid-1960s Brooklyn, my dad was stopped at a traffic light when my brothers and I noticed a group of odd-looking men on the street corner, all with long beards, dark coats and hats. “Who are they?” we asked, pointing.

My father said something along the lines of “they are like us.” We didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. What he meant was that their strong religious beliefs made them look strange to society—and as Catholics we did too, even if our views weren’t manifested in our clothing.

More than 60 years later, these words come back to me as Yeshiva University was granted an 11th-hour reprieve Friday by the Supreme Count. The school had filed an emergency petition with Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Sept. 2, hoping to stay a Manhattan judge’s order that the university grant official recognition to the Yeshiva University Pride Alliance in accord with New York City’s Human Rights Law. The school had decided an official LGBTQ student club wouldn’t be consistent with Torah values at the heart of its identity.

Yeshiva University isn’t just any Jewish school. It is the flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy, committed to the idea that Jews can be at once fully Orthodox and fully engaged with the world. Arguably it is the sweet spot between Haredi Judaism, which tends to keep the outside world at bay, and Reform Judaism, whose embrace of modernity can over time erode Jewish distinctiveness.

New York says Yeshiva doesn’t qualify for a religious exemption. The argument seems to be that because it is incorporated as an educational institution—its motto is Torah Umadda, roughly, Torah plus secular knowledge—it can’t claim to be a religious institution and therefore has no right to an exemption.

Who Will Save Americans From A Weaponized IRS?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/13/who-will-save-americans-from-a-weaponized-irs/

Our American republic did quite well for nearly a century without the IRS or its forerunner, the Office of the Commissioner of Revenue. Today, federal “revenooers” are the greatest threat to freedom in a country where liberty is already being lost at an alarming rate.

The IRS is more than a mere revenue collector for the federal government. It has often been used an instrument of intimidation, even terror, against political foes, and those who might not be so enthusiastic about paying income taxes, or simply have a financial hardship that limits their ability to pay.

Administrations all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt’s have used the IRS to target their opponents. Elliott Roosevelt, one of FDR’s sons, said his father “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.”

And of course most of us recall the IRS sitting on and rejecting applications for tax-exempt status for groups that were trying to organize against the policies of Barack Obama, essentially barring their existence.

Now it’s Joe Biden “turn” to unleash the pain. His misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act created, as we noted earlier, “​​a small army of IRS shock troops who will abet the progressive-socialist political complex’s consolidation of raw political power while wrecking families, individuals, and small businesses.”

No, ‘internecine strife’ is not Israel’s greatest threat Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/no-internecine-strife-is-not-israels-greatest-threat/

 At the annual World Summit on Counter-Terrorism—held on Sunday and Monday at Reichman University in Herzliya—the head of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) gave a speech that raised a few eyebrows. And rightly so.
Listing the threats that the Shin Bet has had to confront, such as those emanating from Hamas in Gaza and the weakening of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, Ronen Bar highlighted an issue that’s outside his purview, to put it mildly.

“From the investigations that we’re conducting, we can say today that [Israel’s] political instability and growing [societal] schism constitute an injection of encouragement to the axis-of-evil countries, terrorist organizations and lone wolves,” he said. “Our historical comparative advantage—the one that was to our credit for thousands of years—is fading away. This insight should be the most disturbing of all. The Shin Bet can warn about but not treat it. [The latter] is in the hands of each and every one of us,” he said.

Some are defending his remarks, which seemed to indicate that terrorists apprehended by the Shin Bet have been telling their interrogators that internecine strife in the Jewish state has bolstered their confidence and resolve. If this is the kind of intel that Israeli security agents are extracting from Palestinian and Arab-Israeli killers, anyone concerned about the violent methods employed during interrogations might as well calm right down.
In other words, it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine that too many conversations about the effects of societal rifts take place during encounters between terrorists and the operatives who manage to locate and detain them. It’s safer to assume that Bar was reaching a conclusion, based on his interpretation of the situation in the areas that he is charged with safeguarding.

Is the ‘Great Reset’ Kaput? By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/09/11/is-the-great-reset-kaput-n1628618

Writing in The Epoch Times, CEO of GnS Economics Tuomas Malinen forecasts the imminent collapse of the European economy. Focusing on the ill-advised sanctions against Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine and the shutting down of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, he reports that “[m]any households and corporations are seeing their energy prices multiply by 10, or more, across the continent.” In the face of a massive spike in energy prices, skyrocketing inflation, the raising of interest rates, the crushing effect on asset markets and the European banking sector, and the explosion of a full-blown debt crisis, Malinen predicts the unraveling of the Eurozone and the possible collapse of the global financial system. The ripple effect would be unstoppable.

If Malinen is right—and his credentials are impeccable—what might the prospects be, in the midst of such carnage, for the Great Reset project, which envisions the corporate seizure of global governance and top-down management of economic affairs? Would the ensuing chaos render the Reset moot since the conditions for a social and economic revolution would be far too unstable for a coherent restructuring of society? Might we finally see the end of the nefarious Klaus Schwab, whose toxic dreams—corporate hegemony, the abolition of private property, and the eclipse of  democratic accountability while civil society becomes little more than window dressing—would have turned to rubble?

As Richard Morrison writes in National Review Capital, “The global regulatory cartel that technocrats such as Schwab envision—a system of supranational policymaking that insulates politicians and CEOs from the demands and expectations of their most important constituents—is exactly the course of action that will end…the amazing growth, health, education and prosperity” that the free-market system has created. Such is the policy that Klaus and his Davos minions would pursue, which the current imbroglio might well put paid to. There would be scarce maneuvering room to set the Schwabian program in place.

The Media’s Pathological Commitment to Dividing Americans along Racial Lines By Isaac Schorr & Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-medias-pathological-commitment-to-dividing-americans-along-racial-lines/

Signs of Rot and Hope in BYU Volleyball Story

When an opportunity arises to publish a story that might make Americans feel as though they’re living in a country just barely more racially harmonious than South Africa under apartheid, much of the mainstream press have long adhered to a compact: Never investigate, and, once the story is proven to be mistaken, never apologize.

Late last month, Rachel Richardson, a member of the Duke University women’s volleyball team, accused fans of the Brigham Young University squad of hurling racial epithets at her during a match at BYU. She further charged BYU officials with having “failed to take the necessary steps to stop the unacceptable behavior and create a safe environment.”

Everyone — including the administration at BYU, who quickly identified and banned a suspect from campus — was rightly horrified by the prospect of such harassment of a black athlete.

Yet at so many outlets, Richardson’s allegations were treated not as a subject of inquiry, but as gospel truth to immediately be atoned for.

“What does it say about the BYU community and culture that this happened?” CNN’S Alisyn Camerota asked BYU’s athletic director. “A Division I volleyball match at Brigham Young University turned really ugly when black players from Duke University endured racial slurs from at least one fan in the crowd,” explained Brianna Keilar, also of CNN.

The New York Times reported that “Marvin Richardson, the father of the Duke volleyball player, said in an interview late Saturday that a slur was repeatedly yelled from the stands as his daughter was serving, making her fear ‘the raucous crowd’ could grow violent.” The Times tacked on that BYU’s “student population is less than 1 percent Black” and “has struggled with creating an inclusive environment for its students of color,” so that readers could understand that BYU is the type of place where racial harassment takes place.