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Ruth King

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Lawfare: ‘A Cynical Manipulation of the Rule of Law’ * Alex Grobman, PhD

By on September 16th, 2021

https://jewishlink.news/features/46007-lawfare-a-cynical-manipulation-of-the-rule-of-law

Having failed to destroy Israel militarily, economically and through terrorism, the Palestinian Arabs have restored to using “political warfare and legal warfare,” said former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. “Today the trenches are in Geneva in the Council of Human Rights, or in New York in the General Assembly, or in the Security Council, or in The Hague, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to damage our foreign relations with other nations.”

Lawfare is a weapon in the political war used by NGOs to delegitimize the Jewish state, demonize her leaders and limit the dissemination of public information about radical Islam. Israel’s enemies exploit U.S. and European courts by initiating civil lawsuits and criminal investigations to thwart Israel’s ability to fight terror by accusing her of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity,” he affirmed.

Captured Al-Qaeda terrorists were ordered to file spurious claims of being abused and tortured in order for the media, the public and the courts to see them as the true victims. As attorney Brooke Goldstein, director of the Lawfare Project maintains, “The object is as much to win a public relations victory as a court case.” This has not stopped them from overtly ignoring basic human rights when they brainwash children to become homicide bombers or use them as human shields.

Anne Herzberg, legal adviser for NGO Monitor, points out the prominent role NGOs have assumed in this process, due to their resources and mostly unrestrained power. Political scientist James McGann explains: “NGOs or civil society organizations (CSOs) have moved from backstage to center stage in world politics and are exerting their power and influence in every aspect of international relations and policymaking … ”

Furthermore, NGOs are “not neutral on issues of policy formation.” This “dual role of providing information and acting as an agent of political pressure on the government, leading to potential conflicts of interest.” This becomes important with regards to the expansion of “universal jurisdiction” and the establishment of international legal institutions.”

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What Progressives Wrought A concise new volume will help Americans make sense of the stark divisions that confront us. Mike Sabo

By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/review-of-america-transformed-by-ronald-j-pestritto

America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism, by Ronald J. Pestritto (Encounter Books, 288 pp., $28.99)

It is no secret that American public life is fracturing. The fissures can be seen in our gladiatorial-like Supreme Court nomination hearings, the collapse of confidence in our institutions, and the mounting sense that many have that elections won’t change the country’s fundamental trajectory. These disputes are merely symptoms, however, of a broader problem, the roots of which extend back decades.

As Ronald J. Pestritto, graduate dean and professor of politics at Hillsdale College, argues in America Transformed, our present-day clashes reflect a fundamental “divide over first principles,” which he traces to the rise of the Progressive Movement in the late nineteenth century. Pestritto makes a convincing case that the Progressives—including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, and John Dewey—sought to “revolutionize both the theory and practice of American government.”

The Progressives had their differences and factions: consider the fierce 1912 presidential campaign between Wilson and Roosevelt. Yet they adhered to a “coherent set of principles, with a common purpose.” They unleashed a “direct assault on the core ideas of the American founding,” openly rejecting the natural rights teachings of the Declaration of Independence. Wilson once told an audience that “if you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface”—the same preface that contains the most concise articulation of the Founders’ political theory.

Pestritto argues that, for progressives like education reformer Dewey, the Founders’ “great sin” was to think that principles such as a natural human equality in rights and government by consent transcended “the particular circumstances of that day.” Influenced by Hegel’s philosophical idealism, they argued that historical progress had shown that what the Founders thought were universal truths were in fact simply ideas of their time. In fact, the principles of the American Founding, and the Constitution built to reflect them, actively prevented government from taking the swift action that the public now demanded.

Pestritto suggests that “native influences” had already compromised the American immune system by the time the Progressive Movement emerged. A toxic mix of Social Darwinism, pragmatism, and the rejection of social compact theory in New England and the antebellum South prepared American intellectuals and politicians to accept an alternative account of politics that seemed better able to meet the challenges of modern society. The Progressives claimed that historical progress necessitated a dynamic and perfectible human nature, an idea that the Founders rejected. James Madison’s claim in Federalist 10 that the prevention of majority tyranny would always be a problem in political life was simply false, they believed. Thus Woodrow Wilson and political scientist Frank Goodnow sharply criticized the Constitution’s separation of powers and the slow, methodical lawmaking process the Framers had put in place, which they saw as hopelessly out of step with the public will and too often stymied by a combination of political machines, big business, and other special interests.

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UK: Record Number of Migrants Crossing English Channel by Soeren Kern

By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17754/britain-migrants-english-channel

More than 14,500 migrants have crossed the Channel in around 600 small boats so far in 2021, surpassing the 8,713 arrivals (in 650 boats) during all of 2020, according to Migration Watch, which notes that the actual number of arrivals is probably far higher than what has been recorded in official statistics. Since the beginning of 2021, not a single migrant has been deported to the safe European countries they traveled through.

“The incentives are skewed so that they encourage, rather than discourage, illegal (and dangerous) trips that often lead to asylum abuse.” — Migration Watch UK.

“They want to go to England because they can expect better conditions on arrival there than anywhere else in Europe or even internationally. There are no ID cards. They can easily find work outside the formal economy, which is not really controlled.” — Mayor of Calais Natacha Bouchart.

“Both traffickers and migrants know that ‘no civilized country can allow people to drown at sea’; this is why people get on overcrowded vessels. ‘And this is why Britain is about to be plunged into a similar crisis to the one Italy faced three years ago, albeit on a reduced scale.'” — British news magazine, The Week, quoting James Forsyth in The Times.

“Instead of the United Kingdom being able to choose the children and families most in need, illegal immigration instead allows those who pay people smugglers, or who are strong, to push their way to the front of the queue…. Our legal system needs reform. It is open to abuse.” — Immigration Control Minister Chris Philip.

“First it was a few, then hundreds, and now 1,000 in a day, the French just waving them through with a cheery ‘Bon Voyage.’ If the French won’t stop the small boats then we need to by turning them back, making returns and taking firm control of our borders.” — Natalie Elphicke, Conservative MP for Dover.

Nearly a thousand migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East have attempted to cross the English Channel on small boats in just one day to illegally get into the United Kingdom. The record-breaking surge in illegal crossings is being facilitated by warm weather and calm seas.

The British government is struggling to stop the crossings — partly because of its need for cooperation from France. British authorities have repeatedly accused their French counterparts of not doing enough to stop small boats from leaving French territorial waters.

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The Deep Politics of Vaccine Mandates Charles Lipson

By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/09/15/the_deep_politics_of_vaccine_mandates_146408.html

The debate over President Biden’s vaccine mandates has focused, understandably, on the tradeoff between individual rights to make medical choices and the potential harm the unvaccinated pose to others. That tradeoff is unavoidable. It is simply wrong for Biden to say, “It’s not about freedom.” It is. It is equally wrong for some Republican governors to say it is all about freedom. It’s also about the external effects of each person’s choice. To pretend that tradeoff doesn’t exist is demagoguery. But then, so is most American politics these days.

What’s missing or underappreciated in this debate?

The most important thing is that the Biden administration’s “mandate approach” is standard-issue progressivism. The pushback is equally standard. The mandates exemplify a dispute that has been at the heart of American politics for over a century, ever since Woodrow Wilson formulated it as a professor and then president. That agenda emphasizes deference to

Experts, not elected politicians,
Rational bureaucratic procedures,
Centralized power in the nation’s capital, not in the federal states, and
A modern, “living constitution,” which replaces the “old” Constitution of 1787 and severs the restraints it imposed on government power.

Implemented over several decades, this progressive agenda has gradually become a fait accompli, without ever formally amending the Constitution. The bureaucracies began their massive growth after World War II and especially after Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the mid-1960s (continued, with equal vigor, by Richard Nixon).

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China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Bad News for Human Rights by Judith Bergman

By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17735/china-belt-road-human-rights

Findings about BRI’s negative impact on human rights in Cambodia and Guinea raise the much wider issue of how China’s Belt and Road Initiative affects human rights worldwide. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, around 139 countries — more than half the countries in the world — have now joined BRI.

China has also invested in multiple large-scale BRI projects in Iran, which has reportedly been leasing out its territorial waters in the Persian Gulf to Chinese industrial ships for more than a decade. This arrangement has led to a situation… where Chinese fishing vessels are “illegally cleaning out fish resources in the Persian Gulf” while “Iranian fishermen are forced to pay ten thousand dollars in bribes to Somalian pirates to let them fish on the African shores”.

Such a compromise of locals’ food-and-income security is a measure of China’s influence in the country — and a practice coupled with the Iranian government’s disregard for the living conditions of its own citizens. Scant regard for human rights is presumably also one of the reasons why China prefers to deal with autocratic regimes.

A new report, “Underwater: Human Rights Impacts of a China Belt and Road Project in Cambodia,” has found that one of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in Cambodia — a hydroelectric dam known as the Lower Sesan 2, completed in 2018 — resulted in severe human rights violations. The project displaced nearly 5,000 mainly indigenous people and ethnic minorities, who had lived in villages along the Sesan and Srepok Rivers for generations, earning a living from fishing and agriculture. The project, the report estimates, negatively affected the lives of tens of thousands of other locals, who depend on fishing in the rivers for food and income. The project compromised locals’ food security, and their losses were either inadequately compensated or not compensated at all. The Lower Sesan 2 is just one out of seven BRI hydroelectric projects in Cambodia.

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‘Science,’ They Said Science is dying; superstition disguised as morality is returning. And we all will soon become poorer, angrier and more divided.  By Victor Davis Hanson

By on September 16th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/15/science-they-said/

The scientific method used to govern much of popular American thinking. 

In empirical fashion scientists advised us to examine evidence and data, and then by induction come to rational hypotheses. The enemies of “science” were politics, superstition, bias, and deduction. 

Yet we are now returning to our version of medieval alchemy and astrology in rejecting a millennium of the scientific method.  

Take the superstitions that now surround COVID-19. 

We now know from data that a prior case of COVID offers immunity as robust as vaccination—if not better. 

Why then are Joe Biden’s various proposed vaccination mandates ignoring that scientific fact? Dr. Anthony Fauci, when asked, seemed at a loss for words. 

Is this yet another of the scientific community’s Platonic “noble lies,” as when last year Fauci assured the public there was no need for masks? He later claimed he had lied so that medical professionals would not run out of needed supplies. 

Fauci also seemed to throw out all sorts of mythical percentages needed for herd immunity, apparently in an attempt to convince the public that it will never be safe until every American is protected from COVID by vaccination only.

And why was it that hard for the scientific community to postulate a likely origin of COVID-19? 

Instead, some of the very scientists engaged in gain of function research oversaw an investigation with Chinese authorities. They all confirmed the predetermined conclusion that the virus likely had little to do with gain of function engineering. And they saw little proof it was birthed in the Wuhan virology lab. 

Yet the preponderance of scientific opinion, emerging data and evidence, and basic logic have suggested just the opposite.  

How can the government hector citizens that they have a moral duty and soon a legal obligation to be vaccinated, when it does not ask vaccinations of unvetted refugees flying in from Afghanistan? 

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‘Nevergreen’ and Academia’s Cancel Culture A fictional account of academic cancel culture mirrors a troubling reality on campuses today. Richard L. Cravatts

By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/nevergreen-and-academias-cancel-culture-richard-l-cravatts/

In 2017, a controversy embroiled Bret Weinstein, a self-described liberal, white professor at Evergreen State College, who was vilified by students when he refused to stay off campus on the School’s Day of Absence, an annual event during which Evergreen’s white students and faculty are urged not to come to campus. “On a college campus,” Weinstein told students, “one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”

In response to what was perceived to be his astounding audacity in questioning what had become black students’ opportunity to banish whites from campus in order to promote their self-determination, Weinstein was denounced for his “anti-blackness,” faced calls for his dismissal, and even confronted threats to do him physical harm, as student thugs, armed with clubs and baseball bats, roamed the campus looking for Weinstein and other administrators who prostrated themselves before the social justice warrior hordes who virtually took over the entire campus and, as a reward for their criminal behavior, wrestled a bundle of concessions from the feckless administration. 

Professor Weinstein was one of the first—and one of the most visible—victims in the cancel culture that has now engulfed many university campuses, paroxysmic moral orgies in which virtue-signaling students and faculty—usually, though not exclusively, on the left—censure and public humiliate anyone who has voiced unacceptable opinions, written forbidden thought, taught dissenting views that challenge or question the prevailing orthodoxy of race-obsessed universities.

This troubling trend forms the basis of a satiric, yet dark new novel from Professor Andrew Pessin, Nevergreen (previously reviewed at FrontPage Magazine by the insightful Daniel Greenfield), a book whose own title gives a nod to the Evergreen affair and which follows the tortured protagonist, J., a middle-aged, burnt-out professor who finds himself on the Nevergreen island campus as a guest speaker, and ends up in a nightmarish Orwellian pursuit by students who “hate hate” and wish to violently purge all haters from their midst.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Corrupt University and 9/11 Ideas have consequences. Bruce Thornton

By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/corrupt-university-and-911-bruce-thornton/

In the Nineties I wrote frequently about the role of multiculturalism, leftist politics, and postmodern theory in the degradation of the humanities and social sciences. It was clear to many of us tracking these developments that since the Seventies, foundational skills and knowledge had been slowly eroded, their place taken by politics and dubious theory. Back then, the danger seemed confined to the elite groves of postgraduate education. As a consequence, liberal education, the “free play of the mind on all subjects,” as Matthew Arnold put it, and “the instinct to know the best that is known and thought in the world,” was being replaced by the “boots are better than Shakespeare” philistinism of political activism, and the “higher nonsense” of postmodern theory.

But our government’s feckless response during the Nineties to al Qaeda’s serial attacks, and the gruesome slaughter on 9/11 that climaxed those errors, made me realize that much of our foreign policy failures reflected some of the pernicious ideas that had escaped from the diseased groves of academe. The smoldering ruins and 3000 dead was a graphic reminder that ideas do indeed have consequences.

The foundational idea of both Marxist theory and postmodernism is the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” the assumption that what we perceive as the true nature of things is a false narrative contrived by hegemonic power to keep us pliant and obedient as it pursues its nefarious, oppressive policies and practices such as colonialism, imperialism, racism, and sexism. In time the list would include homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, and a generalized bigotry against “people of color,” a category based on the old, reductive taxonomy of “scientific racism.”

From this perspective, the achievements of Western Civilization were a mere fictive construct designed to mask that history of bloody oppression. “Facts” and “truth” likewise were mere components of a “discourse regime,” arbitrary linguistic signs with no foundation in reality. “Multiculturalism” and “diversity” became the weapons for dismantling this regime by elevating and privileging the “other” of “color.” All political analyses were reduced to the Leninist “Who, whom”––Who is the oppressor, and whom does he oppress.

Of course, it is easy to see the fundamental contradiction in this narrative. If truth is just a construct that enables oppression, on what grounds can the postmodern theorist embrace, or even articulate, any political cause? Where is his privileged space existing apart from the hegemonic discourses that allegedly have so much reach and power over us for obscuring its malignant machinations? If language is reduced to the play of signifiers that can never communicate a meaning, what happens to “human rights” or “liberation” or “national self-determination” or the “workers’ paradise”?

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The Unsung Death of ‘My Body, My Choice’ By Jack Cashill

By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/the_unsung_death_of_my_body_my_choice.html

Just 79 minutes after Harris breathed new life into it, President Joe Biden put the mantra out of its misery

As late as 3:43 p.m. on Thursday, September 9, the long-lived mantra of the pro-abortion movement, “My Body, My Choice,” was still showing signs of life. It was at that time, that the White House published the remarks made by Vice-President Kamala Harris at a “Reproductive Rights” roundtable.

“The President and I are unequivocal in our support of Roe v. Wade and the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade, and the right of women to make decisions for themselves with whomever they choose — about their own bodies,” said Ms. Harris.

“And, needless to say,” Harris continued much too quotably, “the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is not negotiable. The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is their decision; it is their body.”

So far is Harris out of the White House power loop that she may not have known the mantra had less than two hours to live. 

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If the China Story Is True, Milley Has to Go By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/if-the-china-story-is-true-milley-has-to-go/

At the very least, we must stop the corrosive politicization of institutions that we need to keep nonpolitical — including the military.

I agree with our editorial that General Mark Milley should be aggressively investigated and, if the Washington Post reporting is verified, removed from office. In fact, I think he ought to be pressed, as a preliminary matter, about whether the reporting is substantially accurate; if he concedes that it is, he should be suspended immediately pending an investigation.

But we need a real investigation. I carry no brief for Milley, who personifies the politicization of institutions that must be apolitical in a properly functioning republic. Nevertheless, conclusions about his alleged behavior have gotten way out in front of the evidence.

As our editorial notes, Bob Woodward has a dubious history. As a foundation for admissible evidence, his reporting methods — particularly, encouraging sources to speak without attribution — would be laughed out of a courtroom.

To be sure, the Woodward MO of portraying the most voluble leakers as his story’s most valuable players would strongly suggest that Milley is one of his main sources. On this occasion, that would add credibility to Woodward’s account, on the legal theory of declarations against interest. That is, in touting himself as the commander who bravely reined in an unhinged commander in chief, Milley would have (however inadvertently) admitted misconduct that could subject him to discipline. (Statements against interest, though hearsay, are generally admissible in court because they are presumptively reliable: When people acknowledge actions that put them at risk, they are usually not lying.)

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