Displaying the most recent of 90425 posts written by

Ruth King

Palestinian Elections: What the Biden Administration Does Not Want to Know by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17259/palestinian-elections-biden-administration

Hamas and the PFLP have rejected all the agreements signed between Israel and the PLO, including the Oslo Accords. Yet, these terrorist groups have no problem running in an election held under the umbrella of the Oslo Accords.

[I]t is already evident that some of them have no intention of complying with the wishes of the State Department about “renouncing violence and terrorism” or accepting the “two-state solution.”

Representatives of some of the lists running in the election, in fact, are promising the exact opposite. They are saying that they are committed to continuing the fight against Israel and have absolutely no intention of recognizing Israel’s right to exist.

These Palestinians oppose any recognition of Israel’s right to exist; they oppose any form of normalization with Israel; they oppose any peace talks with Israel and have repeatedly denounced any peace process with Israel as an act of treason.

Abu Zuhri and the Hamas leadership are sending the following message to the State Department spokesman: If you think Hamas will renounce violence and terrorism or accept the so-called two-state solution, you are sadly deluding yourself.

This dangerous exploitation of the Oslo Accords, however, does not seem to bother the US administration or the European Union when they talk about the need for the Palestinians to have free and democratic elections.

Like Hamas, the PFLP also vowed to pursue the fight against Israel “until the liberation of all of Palestine” — in other words, all of Israel.

Under the current circumstances, it seems that Palestinians who support terrorism and do not accept the “two-state solution” are headed toward dominating the next Palestinian parliament and government.

Now that the Hamas and the PFLP candidates have been approved by the Central Elections Commission, the US or the rest of the international community can prevent this plot from materializing by making it clear that they will not recognize any future Palestinian government with terrorists. This demand should be made before, not after the elections.

During a press briefing on April 1, US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price talked about the upcoming Palestinian elections and the “two-state solution.” On the elections, the first in 15 years, Price said:

“The exercise of democratic elections is a matter for the Palestinian people to determine. We note that the US and other key partners in the international community have long been clear about the importance of participants in that democratic process, renouncing violence and renouncing terrorism, recognizing Israel’s right to exist.”

On recognizing Israel’s right to exist, Price said:

“The two-state solution is precisely what will allow Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in dignity and security, securing the interests – in the interests of Israelis, in the interests of Palestinians together. That’s precisely why are we are supporting this two-state solution, just as previous administrations of both political stripes have.”

Two days later, the Palestinian Central Elections Commission announced that 36 lists have submitted electoral slates for the parliamentary elections, scheduled for May 22.

The Mendacity of Joe Biden and the Ruling Elites By Steve McCann

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/the_mendacity_of_joe_biden_and_the_ruling_elites.html

Biden is not an absent-minded grandfatherly and politically moderate occupant of the White House but the most dishonest, deceitful and mendacious person in a position of power in American history.

An ex-business partner and I were recently reminiscing about an encounter we had with then Senator Biden at MBNA’s new corporate offices in downtown Wilmington in 1996. (MBNA was then the world’s largest independent credit card issuer.)   Biden was running for re-election, so he was glad-handing anyone within reach, and we were, unfortunately, in the line of fire having just left a meeting and walking through the lobby.  Flashing a toothy grin, dripping with condescension and insincerity, he grabbed my hand and said, “Good to meet you, hope you’ll vote for me in November. Like your tie.”  

Fighting the urge to go and wash my hands and thinking of his disastrous 1987 presidential campaign and history of political sleaze, I said to my partner, after Biden had pressed his flesh, “Damn, I hope that oily bastard is never elected President.”

The chance meeting at the MBNA building was appropriate as Biden was not only a Senator from Delaware but was so blatantly acting as MBNA’s chief “lobbyist” that he was often referred to as “The Senator from MBNA.”   In 1996, MBNA hired Joe’s son, Hunter, fresh out of law school, having never worked in finance or banking, as a “senior vice president” making $100,000.00 per year ($168,00.00 in 2021 dollars) plus a substantial signing bonus. 

It was after this run-in with Joe Biden that I began to pay more attention to his fabulist tendencies, lack of character and compulsive lying.  While his cognitive decline is an ancillary factor in what the American people see today, the reality is that he has always been someone who will do or say anything to advance his personal aspirations.  Which has always been more than just mundane financial or material accumulation.  Biden has long harbored the dream of being praised in the history books as the next Franklin Roosevelt, the demigod in the pantheon of Democrat party icons.   His impatience to achieve that goal had him seriously considering a presidential run in 1980 when he was 37.  His first bid for the presidency was in 1987 at 44.

Good news from Iran: The Israelis are still working to stop the Iranian nuclear program By Michael A. Thiac

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/_good_news_from_iran_the_israelis_are_still_working_to_stop_the_iranian_nuclear_program.html

One of the many disasters of the Obama years was the Iran nuke deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

In exchange for one-billion seven hundred million dollars (400 million in cold, hard, cash), we got…their promise they will be good.

Well, no one expected the Iranians to keep their word, and yes, they have continued to work towards nuclear weapons. But today we’ve heard of some good news from the Iranian desert. Their nuclear research facility took a hit.

According to the New York Times on Sunday:

A power failure that appeared to have been caused by a deliberately planned explosion struck Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment site on Sunday, in what Iranian officials called an act of sabotage that they suggested had been carried out by Israel.

The blackout injected new uncertainty into diplomatic efforts that began last week to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal repudiated by the Trump administration.

Iran did not say precisely what had caused the blackout at the heavily fortified site, which has been a target of previous sabotage, and Israel publicly declined to confirm or deny any responsibility. But American and Israeli intelligence officials said there had been an Israeli role.

Abbas’ Parliamentary List Includes Terrorists and Their Relatives Flaunting the willingness to reward Palestinian jihadists. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/abbas-parliamentary-list-includes-terrorists-and-hugh-fitzgerald/

So much has been happening with the Palestinians and their new friends in Washington. First, there was the announcement by Linda Thomas-Greenwood, our ambassador to the U.N., that the U.S. would be giving $15 million to the PA, presumably as a token of American affection and esteem. No one mentioned that this violated the Taylor Force Act, which prohibits American aid to the Palestinians as long as the “Pay-For-Slay” program continues. And it is continuing. But the Biden Administration is so eager to lavish money on the Palestinians that it is willing to take a chance that Congress won’t raise a fuss about Taylor Force. And so far it hasn’t. To make matters still worse, now the Biden Administration says it will send another $80 million to the Palestinians. That constitutes another, even bigger, violation of the Taylor Force Act. And yet that news was met with the same inexplicable silence from Congress. And while we are at it, we have a question for Biden, Blinken et al. What exactly have the Palestinians done to deserve having the spigot of American aid turned back on? They did nothing. Absolutely nothing.

But it gets worse. Mahmoud Abbas has announced his list of candidates for the Palestinian parliamentary elections that are to be held on May 22. A report on that list is here: “Report: Abbas’ Party List for Upcoming Elections Includes Terrorists and Their Relatives,” by Benjamin Kerstein, Algemeiner, April 1, 2021:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party has placed convicted terrorists and relatives of terrorists in high positions on its list for the upcoming PA elections, Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported Thursday.

Second on Abbas’ party list is the widow of one of those responsible for the notorious 2001 attack that killed Israeli 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass, during the second intifada.

Putting this woman second on the party list for the Palestinian parliamentary elections is a sign of the respect in which she is held by Mahmoud Abbas. After all, she is the widow of Mahmoud Amru, who took deliberate aim at a Jewish baby sitting in her stroller, and killed her, thus becoming a true Palestinian hero. By honoring his widow as a way of paying tribute to Amru himelf, Abbas is deliberately flaunting his willingness to reward terrorists, even beyond what Pay-For-Slay provides.

Hunter Biden Calls Laptop a ‘Red Herring’ as Daily Mail Publishes Shocking New Photos and Texts By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/09/hunter-biden-calls-laptop-a-red-herring-as-daily-mail-publishes-shocking-new-photos-and-texts/

During a television interview Thursday, Hunter Biden refused to admit that the infamous MacBook Pro—which exposed his family’s sketchy overseas business wheeling and dealings, as well as his own depraved, drug-induced sexual escapades—is his, even though the authenticity of his laptop has been verified by multiple sources. The scandal-plagued younger Biden asserted that any reporting on the bombshell cache of 103,000 text messages, 154,000 emails, more than 2,000 photos and dozens of videos, was a “red herring.”

He has recently admitted however that the laptop “could” be his, although he couldn’t remember dropping the device off at the repair shop.

The Daily Mail, which has conducted its own forensic investigation of the MacBook Pro, on Thursday published shocking, never-before-seen photos from the cache, including a horrifying pre-dental treatment close-up of Hunter Biden’s “meth-mouth,” and a photo of him frolicking on a bed with two prostitutes.

Texts published by The Daily Mail reveal:

• How he begged his father to run for president in 2019 to salvage Hunter’s own reputation
• How he repeatedly dodged police action against him, despite constantly dealing with drug pushers and prostitutes and having multiple run-ins with law enforcement
• Hunter was guarded by a Secret Service agent while on a 2018 drug and prostitute binge in Hollywood, despite not being entitled to protection at the time and amid denials from the federal agency
• Joe Biden was afraid his text conversations with Hunter were being hacked even as they discussed his White House bid
• How Hunter’s laptop is brimming with evidence of apparent criminal activity by Hunter and his associates including drug trafficking and prostitution.

Can the Great ‘Awokening’ Succeed? Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/11/can-the-great-awokening-succeed/

Wokeism is creating a future group of politically incorrect Trotskyites on a proverbial rendezvous with a Mexican ice pick, given that by birth they will never be woke enough for the new Stalinism.

We all know that we are living in revolutionary times. The origins, ascendence, values, laws, and future of the United States are all under assault by self-described, though accurately described, revolutionaries.

It is a Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist moment. All aspects of life, well beyond politics, are now to be ideologically conditioned. Everything from kindergarten messaging, cartoons, workplace reeducation, and television commercials to college admissions, baseball games, and the airlines are to be “fundamentally transformed” along racial lines.

Long gone is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society. Gone, at least at the state level, is confidence in the melting pot of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage (although mixed marriages and multiracial children are at an all-time high).

Gone are even the affirmative-action doctrines of proportional representation and disparate impact. (Yet the two mandates were always arbitrarily applied, in the sense that the U.S. Postal Service and the professional football and basketball leagues never paid much attention to racial quotas based on demographic percentages, which apparently only applied to white and Asian “overrepresentation” elsewhere).

Wokeism, however, is essentially tribal. It seeks to identify particular nonwhite constituencies, unite them not by identical class, not by similar skin color, not by collective similar history, not by shared experience, not by mutual cultural affinities, not by longstanding historical alliances, but simply by two premises:

1) Those of the woke collective are either claimants to being “nonwhite,” and thus victims of racism, or they are architects and supporters of the wokeist agenda, and: 2) they can thereby all either directly leverage reparatory concessions in hiring, admissions, careers, compensation, and general influence or ensure the revolutionary guillotine exempts themselves.

A cynic might add that much of this new racialism is a product of globalteering, and seeks to cater to huge foreign markets—China especially—by both “looking more like the world,” and delighting America’s critics, while appeasing far less moral audiences and consumers abroad than a perceived shrinking market at home.

Still for the woke revolution to succeed, a number of experiments will have to go its way.

Gavin Newsom’s Cousin and His Wife Stopped By to Sign the Recall Petition ‘Recall Gavin’ is about much more than signatures on a page. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/gavin-newsoms-cousin-and-his-wife-stopped-sign-katie-hopkins/

I hear people talk about the recall of California Governor Gavin Newsom almost casually, as if talking about the weather or the price of gas.

Scars from the recent election, “stolen” in the eyes of 80 million or so great Americans, are still fresh and understandably many expect House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her band of half-wits to find a way around the recall itself, subverting democracy once again.

Others have one eye on the horizon, looking over the shoulder of the recall itself to the possible replacements that have a chance to beat Newsom, like that guy at a party who talks at you whilst scanning the room to see whom he can prey on next.

And conflicts are forming around the potential candidates, even before some of them declare their run. The former Mayor of San Diego, Kevin Faulconer, has the backing of the Sacramento GOP chair but has already drawn the ire of Donald Trump’s eldest son after he declined to state whether he wanted a Trump endorsement ahead of his election. The word RINO follows him like a bad smell.

Kaitlyn Jenner also says she will run. For her it is an opportunity for publicity and to feel politically relevant. I would call it willy-waving but with Kaitlyn… well, let’s just call it self-promotion.

My email inbox is crammed with messages asking me to get Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence Rick Grenell to run, as if my sheer forcefulness will make him announce. I am certain he will, but he appears to be waiting for the recall to be official before he does so, which is proper. I hear rumblings that his sexuality might hurt his Christian Conservative vote. But surely with Trump’s backing and patriotic pastors by his side, these prejudices could be put aside for the greater good of California.

Overall, the voters will be presented with a choice:

Do they want to recall Gavin Newsom?

Woke Kindergarten Anti-American brainwashing starts early. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/woke-kindergarten-matthew-vadum/

The Left’s unceasing efforts to turn the young against America will be supercharged with your tax dollars if a radical new plan devoting $6 billion to leftist educational indoctrination becomes law.

The proposed “Civics Secures Democracy Act,” introduced in Congress last month would authorize $1 billion per year in federal grants over six years for K–12 curriculum development, teacher training, and research on the teaching of history and civics.

It would also subsidize left-wing political agitation for course credit.

“These Alinskyite proposals seek to normalize in children radical leftist political activism disguised as public service,” said Pete Hutchison, president of Landmark Legal Foundation.

“Patterned after the environmental movement’s co-opting of children in the 1970s, we face both the bogus critical race theory and phony civic action programs that are fundamental challenges to our very way of life.”

U.S. taxpayers have indeed been funding subversive left-wing groups like the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation since at least the Johnson administration. Radicals advance their objectives, erode civil society, and send you the bill.

The Biden administration is fully behind this push to further entrench an ahistorical, politically slanted interpretation of American history and civics into the nation’s classrooms, where, in many cases, the writings of dead communist scholar Howard Zinn, along with nonsensical pabulum from the 1619 Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center, are already taught as objective truth.

The BLM and Biden Scandals You Weren’t Supposed to See By John Fund

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-blm-and-biden-scandals-you-werent-supposed-to-see/

Censoring content about these controversies only fuels the public’s increasing distrust of the media and Big Tech.

E ric Hoffer, the late “longshoreman philosopher,” said that “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

Most of the defenders of censorship by Big Tech have claimed that most of the removed postings have violated “the science” surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. This ignored the fact that many of the offending posts have been by highly credentialed scientists and medical specialists from some of the most prestigious institutions in the world, including Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Oxford.

But what explains Twitter’s censorship of Jason Whitlock, an African-American sports commentator formerly of ESPN?

Whitlock’s crime is that he posted a link to a real estate blog showing that Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a Black Lives Matter co-founder, was buying a $1.4 million home in a secluded Los Angeles neighborhood where only 1.4 percent of residents are black.

Whitlock had some fun zinging the self-described “trained Marxist” ideologue for her hypocrisy: “She had a lot of options on where to live. She chose one of the whitest places in California. She’ll have her pick of white cops and white people to complain about. That’s a choice, bro.”

Twitter promptly censored the tweet — posting a notice that it was “no longer available.”

In Less than 3 Months, Joe Biden Has Turned America Into a Sitting Target for International Aggression Julio Rivera

https://townhall.com/columnists/juliorivera/2021/04/12/in-less-than-3-months-joe-biden-has-turned-america-into-a-sitting-target-for-international-aggression-n2587732

We are less than 90 Days into Joe Biden’s Presidency and it seems clear that the United States is no longer prioritizing national security, and this is seen in ways including the administration’s handling of the country’s southern border.

As far as the current migrant crisis we face, this unmitigated disaster is a self-inflicted wound that began with Biden publicly disclosing his intent to legalize as many as 11 million illegal aliens in the weeks following his victory in this past November’s election. 

This reversal in American immigration policy along with his decision to immediately stop construction of border walls and fencing, was directly responsible for the 78,323 border patrol encounters with migrants in the south-western states of California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in January of 2021. That number was more than double the reported 36,585 border patrol encounters that occurred in January of 2020, according to statistics from US Customs and Border Protection. 

Despite a controversial media blackout that led to a visit to the southern border by Republican members of the Senate a just few weeks ago, the mainstream media has not been able to hide this dangerous truth, and human traffickers and organized crime elements from Central America and Mexico are taking notice of the new America attitude towards border crossers and are set profit in the billions of US dollars between the practices of facilitating travel into the US as well as their various illicit activities related to the illegal drug trade and organized crime activities.