https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/video-ami-horowitz-raises-money-woke-students-ami-horowitz/
In his latest “Ami on the Loose” video, filmmaker Ami Horowitz travels to Portland State University to see if he can raise money for the Palestinian terror group Hamas to attack “soft targets” in Israel like cafes and schools. Check out how dishearteningly successful he is in the very short, must-see video below:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/st-louis-mayor-guts-police-matthew-vadum/
The newly arrived radical leftist mayor of St. Louis, Missouri, the city with the worst murder rate in America, is committed to leaving her constituents at the mercy of violent criminals by defunding the local police department and shutting down one of the city’s two jails.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, a woke black Democrat, was sworn in in April after narrowly defeating Cara Spencer, a similarly woke leftist white woman.
Jones’s campaign, which focused on “progressive” criminal justice reforms, was unabashedly racist. She said during a debate that Spencer wouldn’t be a good mayor because her skin was the wrong color.
A “white person doesn’t have to worry about their children getting hit by a stray bullet when he’s outside,” Jones said. “While I appreciate the role of white allies in this movement of progress, I don’t believe that they have the lived experiences to lead a majority-minority city.”
Her victory speech was weighted down with platitudes.
“I will not stay silent when I spot racism,” Jones said. “I will not stay silent when I spot homophobia or transphobia. I will not stay silent when I spot xenophobia. I will not stay silent when I spot religious intolerance. I will not stay silent when I spot any injustice.”
Her father is crooked former elected official Virvus Jones. Mr. Jones was the city’s chief financial officer from 1988 to 1995 when he left office after pleading guilty to felony tax fraud.
His Twitter feed is woke, incendiary, and subversive. His Twitter profile is a cross between Hillary Clinton and Nero. It reads simply: “An African Proverb: The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”
In a May 23 tweet he whined as follows: “Warrants issued for non violent or victimless crimes should not be a death sentence for black people. Police in the US are the equivalence [sic] of slave patrols[,]” he wrote, embracing a lie promoted by the 1619 Project. “Most of the warrants the police serve are not for violent crimes so there is no reason to shoot at a person fleeing.”
St. Louis is in rough shape as Mayor Jones takes the reins.
The city had 262 homicides or 87 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2020, the highest in the country, Fox News reported, and it is on track to break that record this year.
As of April 7, St. Louis had 50 homicides since January 1, 2021, an increase of 10 from April 7 the previous year.
The 262 figure for 2020 is five less than the record of 267 set in 1993, according to police. “But because the city’s population has declined since 1993, the per capita homicide rate was much higher in 2020. The homicide pace in 2021 is ahead of last year’s pace,” KMOV4 reports.
“More police doesn’t prevent crime,” Jones told The Telegraph.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/its-getting-bad-for-the-jews/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=also-from-author&utm_term=first
Thoughts on the rising hostility in the United States and in Europe
F or the past couple of years, there have been reports about an uptick in “random” assaults in New York. Men are just walking along a street in Brooklyn, and they get sucker-punched. Except it isn’t random. The victims are Orthodox Jews. This growing uptick in assaults has been punctuated by mass killings at Jewish synagogues in San Diego, Pittsburgh, and upstate New York. In recent weeks, as a conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza has become the occasion for a coming-out party for a newly confident anti-Zionist wing in the American Left, we also see newly confident thugs assaulting Jews in Manhattan’s Diamond District while shouting slogans about Palestine.
This is a scandal beyond words. Secular and religious Jews are formed to be sensitive to these upsurges in hostility and violence because their history as a people in exile tells them that these spasms of violence do not just subside. They tend to grow and grow until Jews are finally forced to emigrate. Jewish life is dying out in Paris precisely because of a growing pattern of street harassment and assaults that are punctuated by terrorist attacks aimed at killing masses of Jews at synagogues and kosher supermarkets. Parisian Jews are leaving for Israel. There was a time they might have left for New York. I expect that for many Jews, the realization that New York could go the way of Paris would be the bitterest pill to swallow.
Speaking of the Europeans, what’s going on there is also a scandal. The news of rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel, and Israel launching attacks on the positions from which they are fired, set off major protests in European cities. Now, criticism would be one thing. The state of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces, and even the Israeli people are just that — people — and they are capable of folly, prejudice, and cruelty like any other. And the Palestinians are people too — many of them living in a situation that is abjectly miserable. Imagine both resenting Israel and having the foreign government of Iran pay for the thugs of Hamas to be your political leadership while you seek satisfaction and try to make a life for your family.
But these protests in European cities are not focused on legitimate criticisms of Israel. In North London, a group of Muslim men drove a kind of convoy through a Jewish neighborhood, shouting slogans such as, “F*** the Jews, rape their daughters.”
But crude as this was, there is something more scandalous about the protests in Europe. Muslims might at least feel like a party to the Israeli–Gaza conflict, in some way. What’s truly disturbing is the mass of secular Europeans who come from long lines of native residents in their countries joining in.
It brings up the question of why Israel’s actions bother Europeans so much. The oppression of the Kurds by Turkey occasions not a peep of protest. You’d think it might, given European connections to Turkey through NATO and other European Union–led deals about migration. Or the fact that the tyrant Recep Erdogan travels to European capitals and holds massive campaign rallies to capture the votes of Turkish men and women who live abroad. If the motor is a kind of anti-Americanism — American support for Israel is often brought up at these European protests — then why not protest the humanitarian disaster that has been Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, which causes starvation and has exacerbated the worst cholera outbreak in modern history?
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/06/14/the-fall-of-saint-anthony-fauci/#slide-1
On the unforced errors of America’s most political doctor
In mid March of 2020, most Americans, including those in the White House, were still trying to understand the COVID-19 crisis unfolding around them. In a span of 24 hours, the NBA came to a sudden halt when players tested positive for the virus; seemingly minutes later, the American actor Tom Hanks announced from Australia that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, had this mysterious new illness; stock markets crashed around the world; President Donald Trump declared a pause on travel from Europe; and the World Health Organization, belatedly, labeled the spread of the coronavirus a pandemic. On March 16, the Trump White House called for 15 days to slow the spread of the virus — a lockdown.
The White House coronavirus task force was meeting regularly and issuing daily briefings at that time. In the Situation Room, economic advisers began presenting their models and predictions for the economic effects of lockdown to the task force, including its leader, Vice President Mike Pence, and the president. What the advisers reported was shocking. Just four weeks of lockdown would lead to millions of Americans unemployed, extreme burdens on the public purse, and the greatest one-month contraction of the American economy since the Great Depression. A health adviser present said that, as the lights came up following the presentation, the faces of most of the advisers in the room were ashen. The gravity of what had just been said — all of which shortly came to pass — seemed to have stunned everyone into silence.
Except one man. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), immediately turned to Vice President Pence and asked a question that appeared to dismiss not only the imminent miseries of lockdown but the relevance of the entire subject from the proceedings: “I’m still in charge, right?”
More or less, yes, Fauci was still in charge. And he still is. Though he had spent the weeks before that day giving interviews in which he told Americans to be more concerned about the seasonal flu than the coronavirus, and that the wearing of masks by the public would be useless at protecting them from it, Fauci was cast as the face of America’s best pandemic response, the one figure who took it seriously. Fauci was the anti-Trump, possessed of a “quaint fondness for facts and evidence-based science,” according to the New York Times. Trump’s biggest supporters, sensing that Fauci was delighting in this role and despairing as they were of lockdowns, turned on the doctor, demanding he be fired. The White House began treating the administration’s most prominent medical expert as a threat, circulating anti-Fauci talking points. Which made progressives embrace him all the more. On social media your liberal friends call their COVID-19 vaccine shots their “Fauci ouchies.” Fauci became the latest warrior-saint of “the Resistance,” holding aloft the banner of science and reason.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/france-suspects-russian-role-in-campaign-to-discredit-pfizer-vaccine-11621978289
PARIS—French counterintelligence authorities are investigating whether the Russian government was behind an attempt to pay high-profile health and science bloggers to sow public doubts about the safety of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, a French security official said.
Several French bloggers said publicly they received emails in recent days from a person claiming to work for a marketing firm called Fazze. The emails, some of which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, offered to pay the bloggers to make videos on YouTube, Instagram and other platforms criticizing the vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, which has been the most widely used vaccine in France. One blogger told French TV he was offered €2,050 (about $2,500) for a video.
The security official said counterintelligence authorities suspect the Kremlin could be responsible for the emails. The official compared the emails to campaigns run by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian firm that U.S. authorities have identified as responsible for Moscow’s effort to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Western officials have said these operations are an attempt by the Kremlin to undermine public confidence in Western institutions.
The Kremlin didn’t respond to a request for comment. It has previously dismissed accusations that Russia was using disinformation campaigns against Western vaccines and has denied interfering in the U.S. election.
Fazze listed an address in London on its website, which was taken down Tuesday. Fazze isn’t registered as a U.K. company. A post on a Russian employment website describes it as a subsidiary of AdNow, a Moscow-based marketing agency. AdNow didn’t respond to a request for comment. The LinkedIn accounts of Fazze employees, now deleted, show many have been educated in Russian schools, such as Siberian Transport University.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pandemic-of-anti-semitism-11622131302?mod=opinion_lead_pos6
“I am proud to stand with Jews against anti-Semitism, just as many Jews have stood and continue to stand with black Americans against racism. We haven’t stamped out the virus of hatred yet, but all people of goodwill must continue trying to achieve this vital task.”
As if the coronavirus pandemic isn’t bad enough, another sickness is breaking out across the world—a pandemic of anti-Semitism. Hatred of the Jewish people is only one expression of the virus of prejudice. Even our most brilliant scientists can’t develop a vaccine for this disease. All of us—citizens and government officials—need to do our best to stamp it out.
“The recent attacks on the Jewish community are despicable, and they must stop,” President Biden tweeted Monday. “I condemn this hateful behavior at home and abroad—it’s up to all of us to give hate no safe harbor.” All Republicans and Democrats should applaud Mr. Biden’s firm stance.
Hours later, the president signed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act into law, in response to racist attacks against Asian-Americans carried out by bigots who blame them for the coronavirus pandemic.
The latest eruption of anti-Semitism has been sparked by fighting between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip. But the perpetrators of these vile anti-Semitic attacks, in the U.S. and elsewhere, use the actions of Israel as an excuse to mount assaults against Jews.
There is nothing anti-Semitic about policy disagreements with the government of Israel. Jews themselves, including Israelis, are sharply divided in their opinions of the government, just as Americans are sharply divided in our views of the U.S. government. But attacking people because they’re Jewish isn’t about a policy dispute—it is about simple hatred.
Those on the left who profess to champion Palestinian rights are sorely misguided if they believe praising Adolf Hitler, beating up Jews in New York and elsewhere, and defacing synagogues in the U.S. and Europe with swastikas will aid Palestinians.
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/28/bidens-wild-spending-binge-its-socialism-not-stimulus/
Of all President Joe Biden’s awful economic policies, none will have as nasty and lasting an impact on average Americans as the sheer growth he’s proposing for the federal government. His newly unveiled budget lays bare once again the Democratic Party’s sharp socialist turn.
Biden’s budget is, in a word, mammoth. It proposes a total of $6 trillion in spending next year, with a budget deficit of $1.8 trillion. That’s a 36% rise above the pre-pandemic spending of $4.4 trillion in 2019. By 2031, the Biden plan sees spending of $8.1 trillion, while annual deficits will remain above $1.3 trillion every year for all 10 years.
Numbers crunched by the Congressional Budget Office show that Biden’s spending plans would add $22 trillion to our deficits over and above current levels in the decade.
That translates into a massive, unsustainable increase in publicly held federal debt, from an estimated $22.6 trillion this year to just under $43 trillion in 2031. For comparison, it took the U.S. more than 210 years to reach $5 trillion in total federal debt. In the 22 years since then, we’ve added 3.6 times that amount.
Put still another way, our debt will go from 108% of our total GDP to over 130%, a level most economists see as fiscally dangerous, even for a country as well-off as the U.S.
“In just a little over 100 days in the White House Biden has won the mantle as the most fiscally reckless president in American history,” as our friends at The Committee to Unleash Properity put it. “He’s making Barack Obama look like a piker. If his red ink schemes pass Congress, he will have added more to the national debt than the previous five presidents combined.”
Democrats like to say, “who cares? We owe it to ourselves.”
https://www.city-journal.org/leftist-rage-at-uk-home-secretary-priti-patel
Some racism is less racist than other racism. Priti Patel, the British Home Secretary (in effect, the minister of the interior), is the daughter of Indian immigrants from Uganda. She is hated by the intelligentsia because she believes strongly in immigration control, though not an end to all immigration.
A crowd in Glasgow recently gathered to prevent two failed asylum-seekers from being deported by immigration officials. A prominent left-wing union official and member of the Labour Party, Howard Beckett, tweeted “Priti Patel should be deported, not refugees. She can go along with anyone else who supports institutional racism. She is disgusting.”
The Labour Party suspended Beckett (meaning, of course, that he will soon be back), and he issued an apology, though it will reassure neither Patel nor much of the British public. He said: “I certainly didn’t mean it to be taken literally. The idea that I would think that a Home Secretary would or should be deported, I’m against all forms of deportation.”
The two men to be deported had gone through a long legal process and had failed to prove that they were entitled to asylum status. This, and the fact that Beckett subsequently claimed to be against the deportation of anyone in any circumstances whatever—except, perhaps, those whom he disfavored politically—suggests that he would support a complete absence of control over immigration, no matter how large the influx such a policy would bring about.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17412/social-media-antisemitism
People often forget that the very concept of political correctness was invented by Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Now… that social media companies have decided to become “Glavlit” — to publish only material that is supposedly truthful and passes its “community standards” — they have become more like the former Soviet Union than like the United states under the First Amendment.
This is not a call to censor anti-Semitic tweets. It is a call for the social media companies to stop censoring other speech based on criteria of supposed truthfulness, “community standards” and other such questionable criteria that are subject to political, Ideological and other biases. I want no censorship other than for material that is already prohibited by law. But if the social media companies persist in censoring, they must apply a single standard to everything. I want no censorship other than for material that is already prohibited by law.
The current social media have the worst of both worlds: they censor material that is neither dangerous nor necessarily false; and then permit material which is both highly dangerous and demonstrably false.
Social media platforms are engaged in massive censorship of matters related to alleged election fraud, doubts about medicine, vaccination, anything from former President Donald J. Trump, criticism of Black Lives Matter, doubts about transgender activities, climate change, hate speech and other supposedly politically incorrect tweets and posts. At the same time, it is open season for anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and the double standard toward things Jewish.
This combination — censoring many other things but not censoring anti-Semitism — sends a chilling message: If some things are censored because they are untrue, then items that are not censored must have passed some test for truth. Thus, the hashtag #HitlerWasRight, which has been posted thousands of times across the social media, must be true. So, too, must the thousands of tweets and posts that claim Israel is a genocidal, Nazi state that deliberately murders children. These anti-Semitic posts must also meet the “community standards” of the various social media.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/did-unrwas-gaza-director-lose-the-plot-opinion-669433
Normally, I wouldn’t take pity on anyone associated with UNRWA, whose entire existence is based on a false premise: that millions of Palestinians who are not refugees by any measure get to be categorized as such. The semantic trick has kept the NGO in clover since 1949, with its coffers filled and replenished for decades by the international community, in spite of its outdated mandate.
But Schmale deserves at least some sympathy for the wrath that he aroused in Gaza this week. In an interview with Channel 12’s Arad Nir, he had the gall to tell the truth about Operation Guardian of the Walls and the situation in Gaza following last Friday’s ceasefire.
Nir had to try hard to hide his surprise. Bashing Israel in general, and in the wake of a war in particular, is a no-brainer for UNRWA representatives. Yet Schmale actually attempted to portray a complex reality, not merely launch into the kind of tirade that would have matched the footage of Gaza selected to illustrate the three-minute Zoom conversation.
Asked about the “humanitarian situation” in the Strip, Schmale said that though at least 1,000 residential units were destroyed, leaving “a couple of thousand people who don’t have a home they can go back to,” he considers the “biggest damage [to be] psychological,” because “building and rebuilding buildings is easy, and easy to plan for.”
Nir’s attempt to goad him into bemoaning the Gazans’ lack of basic needs also flopped.
“During the 11 days of war, we did not run out of food, water and supplies, [though] we would have if Kerem Shalom and the border would have stayed closed,” he stated. “So, from my point of view, there is no acute or serious shortage of medical supplies, food or water, as long as this now starts – continues – to come in.”
Nir then wanted to know Schmale’s opinion on “claims by Israeli officials that the IDF bombardments were very precise.” Shockingly, the bigwig replied: “I’m not a military expert, but I would not dispute that. I also have the impression that there is a huge sophistication in the way the Israeli military struck over the last 11 days. So, that’s not my issue. My issue is another one. I’ve had many colleagues describe to me that they feel that, in comparison to the 2014 war, this time the strikes felt much more vicious in terms of their impact. So, yes, they didn’t hit, with some exceptions, civilian targets, but the viciousness, the ferocity, of the strikes was heavily felt.”
Top Stories @ Fox News