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February 2023

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UNRWA is Part of the Problem – Not the Solution by Bassam Tawil

By on February 1st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19370/unrwa-problem

The United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has once again requested international financial aid. This is the same organization whose workers have been promoting violence and antisemitism on social media.

UNRWA has since done absolutely nothing to help the “refugees” move on with their lives and seek a better future for themselves or their families.

“Almost all of [the incorrectly labeled Palestinians in Gaza] have been born in Gaza, their parents have been born in Gaza, their grandparents have been born in Gaza… they were never displaced an inch. Yet, every day they hear, they learn, and they get an official stamp from the UN agency that says: ‘That’s not your home. You might have lived here all your life, but your home is there, just across the fence. That’s your real home [Israel], and it was taken from you.” — Einat Wilf, former Israeli politician, YouTube, December 1, 2015

The Geneva-based independent human rights group UN Watch has uncovered evidence of UNRWA staff incitement which clearly violate the agency’s own rules as well as its proclaimed values of intolerance for racism, discrimination or antisemitism.

The report published by UN Watch highlights that more than 100 educators and staff who work for UNRWA schools and social services have publicly promoted violence and antisemitism on social media platforms.

Meanwhile, in 2021, the US government confirmed its “failure to ensure that taxpayer aid dollars sent to the Palestinian government did not ultimately make their way to terrorists.” (United States Government Accountability Office, March 2021)

Terrorist groups in Gaza, such as Hamas, have continued to build terror tunnels under UNRWA schools to use the children as human shields if Israel retaliates after it is attacked — as Hamas member Abu Khaled, In December 2021, openly admitted.

“UNRWA’s procurement contracts suggest that funds are already flowing to PFLP affiliates,” notes foreign policy expert Julia Shulman. “As recently as March, UNRWA was funding the Union of Health Work Committees (UHWC), a Gaza-based entity with extensive links to the PFLP. Earlier this month, Israel charged several staff members from UHWC’s partner organization with funneling funds to the PFLP.

[T]he Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act (PATA)…. prohibits assistance to the PA unless the administration certifies that “no ministry, agency, or instrumentality of the Palestinian Authority is effectively controlled by Hamas.” … This is something Congress should review.

Commenting on the Biden administration decision to restore the financial aid, UN Watch said that now is the time for the US to demand that “neutrality, accountability and transparency” Secretary Antony Blinken paraded. – US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “The United States Restores Assistance to the Palestinians”, state.gov, April 7, 2021Restores Assistance for the

“Many of the original refugees are deceased, but… UNRWA redefined and expanded its definition of refugee.'” — Brett D. Schaefer, Jay Kingham Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center and James Phillips, Visiting Fellow at the Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, heritage.org, September 6, 2018

It does not seem, however, that UNRWA has taken far-reaching and drastic measures to end the incitement to violence and antisemitism. In fact, it has not taken any at all.

It is clear that UNRWA, like many other UN agencies, has become part of the problem, not part of the solution. Instead of seeking ways to solve the problem of the so-called refugees, UNRWA has perpetuated and inflated it…. Instead of promoting peace and non-violence, UNRWA employees have been doing the reverse. Instead of taking a tough and unambiguous stand against terrorism, UNRWA hides behind riddles. UNRWA donors might consider these evasions before they sign the next check to one of the UN’s most incompetent and corrupt organizations.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islamic State Jihadists in Afghanistan by Lawrence A. Franklin

By on February 1st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19296/afghanistan-islamic-state-china

Despite ideological differences, China and Afghanistan are in the process of forming a transactional relationship based on interests. China most likely is waiting for the Taliban to grant it access to Afghanistan’s huge deposits of rare earth materials that America left behind.

It remains to be seen if China decides that, at least for now, a trillion dollars’ worth of Afghan mineral deposits might not be worth the risk of being in the midst of terrorist civil war between the Taliban and the Islamic State.

When two Hellfire missiles last July smashed into the Kabul safehouse that Afghanistan’s regime had been providing to Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri, thereby killing him, the incident simply underscored the continued strong bonds between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

This terrorist alliance, originally forged in the 1990s by the now-deceased leaders of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Osama bin Ladin and Mullah Omar, has resisted intense US pressure to break it up. With the departure of NATO and US forces from Afghanistan, jihadists from the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) have been intensifying their attacks on the Taliban.

Despite ideological differences, China and Afghanistan are in the process of forming a transactional relationship based on interests. China most likely is waiting for the Taliban to grant it access to Afghanistan’s huge deposits of rare earth materials that America left behind.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Do Children Belong to the Public Schools? What the Left says to children behind their parents’ backs. by Joseph Klein

By on February 1st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/do-children-belong-to-the-public-schools/

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, co-authors of The Communist Manifesto, derided what they called the “bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child.”
Soviet revolutionary and Marxist theoretician Alexandra Kollontai, who served as the People’s Commissar for Welfare in Vladimir Lenin’s regime, claimed that parents were “not capable of educating the ‘new person.’” Only qualified educators, she added, will provide the right environment for the child to “grow up a conscious communist who recognizes the need for solidarity, comradeship, mutual help and loyalty to the collective.”

Leftists today have embraced this Communist anti-nuclear family ideology. They believe that it takes the “collective” to raise a child. For example, Melissa Harris-Perry, a professor affiliated with the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Wake Forest University and former host for MSNBC, declared in a commercial she recorded for the network that “we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

Leftwing school administrators and teachers have infiltrated public school systems across the country, allowing them the opportunity to indoctrinate their captive student audiences with poisonous propaganda.

Thus, it is no surprise that these leftwing ideologues are pressuring public schools in many states to step in the shoes of parents and take over deciding what is in the children’s best interests. Public schools are enabling impressionable students as young as eleven to deal with their underlining mental and social problems by expressing a gender identity other than their biological sex. Administrators and teachers play mind games with their students by calling them by their preferred names and pronouns and allowing them to select the bathrooms they wish to use, while hiding all this from the students’ parents. That is child abuse.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Joe and Hunter Biden scandal convergence by Byron York

By on February 1st, 2023

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-joe-and-hunter-biden-scandal-convergence

Republicans have long said the Hunter Biden laptop scandal is really a Joe Biden story. Now, it looks like the Joe Biden classified documents scandal is also a Hunter Biden story. Two Biden scandals are merging into one.

The convergence point is President Joe Biden’s house in Wilmington, Delaware. The public learned in the last few weeks that Biden stored a number of classified documents there, both in his garage, famously next to his vintage Corvette, and in his personal library.

How many documents? Biden will not say. His personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, released a statement saying that after a search of the house, Justice Department lawyers took “six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials.” The problem is, no one knows what an “item” is. Is it a single piece of paper with classification markings? Or is it a box of papers, perhaps hundreds of pages, some of which are marked classified? If you look at how the DOJ described the results of the Trump Mar-a-Lago search, you’ll see it used the word “item” to describe boxes of documents. So there’s no way to be certain how many documents Biden allegedly mishandled.

In any event, the documents were in the house. And then we learned that also in the house at times over the years was Hunter Biden, the president’s formerly drug-addicted son. And of course we know that Hunter Biden spent years cultivating relationships with shady foreign actors. Plus, he was at times addicted to crack and was, to say the least, unreliable when it came to information security. You might recall that he forgot about a whole laptop he once left for repair.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives Kevin Bass

By on February 1st, 2023

https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-scientific-community-admit-we-were-wrong-about-coivd-it-cost-lives-opinion-1776630

As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.

I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.

What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences were—very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.

We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and “they” responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.

We excluded important parts of the population from policy development and castigated critics, which meant that we deployed a monolithic response across an exceptionally diverse nation, forged a society more fractured than ever, and exacerbated longstanding heath and economic disparities.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Classified Documents Everywhere, But Only One Hunter Biden

By on February 1st, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/01/classified-documents-everywhere-but-only-one-hunter-biden/

Leaving Washington with classified documents must be a tradition for outgoing presidents and vice presidents. Sensitive government papers have now been found in the private homes and offices of Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Maybe every president going back for decades has taken documents he shouldn’t have. 

But only one has a crooked son who could have easily accessed those documents and used them to enrich himself and his corrupt family.

The public sure seems to believe that is the case. Six in 10 American voters are convinced it is likely that Biden’s son Hunter used information from the unsecured classified documents found in the current president’s Delaware home to sweeten “his foreign business deals.” Rasmussen Reports head pollster Mark Mitchell says the 60% figure is the “highest number we’ve ever seen implicating Joe Biden in anything.”

Republicans of course are overwhelmingly suspicious of Hunter Biden. But a large majority of independents, 62%, also believe that the president’s son used sensitive government documents to leverage his foreign business interests, according to the Rasmussen poll of 1,000 voters that was finalized over the weekend.

Voters also reckon that the Biden family has been “influence peddling for a decade.” Forty-three percent strongly agree with that statement while another 13% somewhat agree.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The UNC Echo Chamber Fights Back The University of North Carolina faculty is outraged that the school’s trustees favor open academic inquiry.

By on February 1st, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/university-of-north-carolina-school-of-civic-life-and-leadership-daily-tar-heel-board-of-trustees-11675203324?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Our editorial on Friday about the University of North Carolina’s effort to create a new school dedicated to free inquiry and open academic discourse has caused a fuss on campus that illustrates why the new school is needed. It seems that faculty grandees are outraged that the UNC board of trustees thought such a school is necessary and didn’t even seek the faculty’s permission.

The Daily Tar Heel documents the angst in the Chapel Hill faculty lounge in a Jan. 30 story that is unintentionally hilarious in its ivory-tower indignation. The reporter quotes UNC law professor Eric Muller as saying, “I thought: how on Earth? How on Earth could The Wall Street Journal know this.”

Here on Earth, it’s called journalism.

Chair of the Faculty Mimi Chapman told the Tar Heel she is “flabbergasted” at the trustees’ decision and tweeted that UNC alumni are “leading and civically engaged left, right and center” with the hashtag #solutioninsearchofaproblem.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Hulu’s 1619 Project Docuseries Peddles False History The first episode paints an enslaver, plantation master, and Royalist autocrat as a leading and even celebrated agent of emancipation. Phillip W. Magness

By on February 1st, 2023

https://reason.com/2023/01/31/hulus-1619-project-docuseries-peddles-false-history/

The New York Times’ 1619 Project selected Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, as a filming location for its new Hulu docuseries. In doing so, creator Nikole Hannah-Jones sought to bolster her project’s most troublesome claim—the assertion that British overtures toward emancipation impelled the American colonists into revolution, ultimately securing an independent United States.

In the past three years, the Times has grappled with the fallout from Hannah-Jones’ assertion, including the revelation that it ignored its own fact-checker’s warnings against printing the charge. The Times tempered its language to apply to “some of” the colonists, only to see it reasserted by Hannah-Jones in her public commentaries. Later, a related line about the Project’s goal of replacing 1776 with a “true founding” of 1619 disappeared without notice from the Times’ website. The newspaper found itself in a balancing act between its writer’s uncompromising positions and the need to preserve credibility as it made a Pulitzer Prize bid with the series. But Hannah-Jones was not ready to abandon the claim at the center of her lead essay, and the first episode of the Hulu series makes that abundantly clear.

The scene opens in Williamsburg on the grounds of its reconstructed colonial Governor’s Palace, where Hannah-Jones joins University of South Carolina professor Woody Holton—one of a handful of heterodox historians who defended the 1619 Project’s original narrative. As the cameras pan across streets filled with historical re-enactors and tourists in front of restored colonial buildings, the pair take another stab at resurrecting the 1619 Project’s narrative about the American Revolution. The evidence that a British threat to slavery impelled Virginians—or perhaps “the colonists” at large, in Hannah-Jones’ imprecise phrasing—to revolt may be found in the November 1775 decree of John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, Virginia’s last Royalist governor. Facing the collapse of British rule, Dunmore announced that any enslaved male from a household in rebellion would be granted freedom in exchange for military service on the British side.

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