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Ruth King

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Human Rights Watch did a one-sided takedown of Israel By Lawrence J. Haas

By on May 9th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/human-rights-watch-did-a-one-sided-takedown-of-israel-opinion-667590

“Israeli authorities do face legitimate security challenges,” Human Rights Watch acknowledged after accusing Israel of committing two “crimes against humanity” – apartheid and persecution – against Palestinians.

It was a grudging, and altogether disingenuous, admission in a new 217-page report about Israeli actions in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem that ignores history and belies reality, all to paint a strikingly one-sided picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The admission, in fact, seems designed to present a facade of balance in a report that is anything but. In describing Israeli behavior, over the course of decades and today, the report all but ignores the very same “legitimate security challenges,” thus painting a picture of gratuitous Israeli oppression.

Moreover, the report comes as Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza erect more barriers to peace with Israel, and as they themselves degrade the human rights of the Palestinian people. But you’d never know that from the tone of the report, or from what it includes and what it leaves out.

“Israel,” the report declares, “has maintained military rule over some portion of the Palestinian population for all but six months of its 73-year history.” Nowhere does the report note that Palestinian leaders have rejected multiple offers of a state since 1947, or that most Palestinians oppose the very notion of an Israel that occupies any land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

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Eurasian anti-West alliance didn’t have to happen A Russia-China rapprochement motivated by mutual paranoia is a bad outcome for the West David Goldman

By on May 9th, 2021

https://asiatimes.com/2021/05/eurasian-anti-west-alliance-didnt-have-to-happen/

The Russian pessimist says things are so bad they can’t possibly get worse; the Russian optimist says, “Don’t worry, they will!”

If Western leaders think that Russia and China are aggressive now, the Russian-Chinese alliance now emerging will be a nastier combination than most Western observers can imagine.

It doesn’t have to happen, but probably will, given the West’s toxic combination of aggressive posturing and inherent weakness. The former tempts China to use force, and the latter causes China to think that it can get away with using force.

Case in point: On May 6 the hawkish Chinese policy site “Observer” (guancha.cn) led with a 5,000 word screed by Russia’s “Eurasianist” ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, the inspiration for younger officers in Russia’s military and intelligence services who think that Vladimir Putin is too soft on the West.

That should alarm Washington, although I doubt anyone in the White House took notice.

Western commentators demonize Putin, and distract attention from the fact that Russia’s long-serving president is a centrist figure by his country’s standards.

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Biden admin to award millions in science grants for ‘racial equity’ in STEM education By Mary Lou Lang

By on May 9th, 2021

https://justthenews.com/accountability/waste-fraud-and-abuse/biden-admin-gives-millions-grants-racial-equity-stem-education

National Science Foundation “seeks to support bold, groundbreaking and potentially transformative projects addressing systemic racism in STEM” with $30 million program.

The Biden administration is spending millions in grants through the National Science Foundation to address what the federal agency calls “systemic racism” in the country and to advance “racial equity” in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education.

“Persistent racial injustices and inequalities in the United States have led to renewed concern and interest in addressing systemic racism,” reads a synopsis of the Racial Equity in STEM Education Program on the NSF website. “The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) seeks to support bold, groundbreaking and potentially transformative projects addressing systemic racism in STEM.”

Although the grants are funded by the federal government’s primary source of support for basic science research, the agency emphasizes that proposals are to be developed by and reflect the perspective of aggrieved groups and individuals who perceive themselves as victims of undefined “inequities” assumed in advance to be caused by “systemic racism.”

“Core to this funding opportunity is that proposals are led by, or developed and led in authentic partnership with, individuals and communities most impacted by the inequities caused by systemic racism,” specifies the agency. “The voices, knowledge, and experiences of those who have been impacted by enduring racial inequities should be at the center of these proposals, including in, for example: project leadership and research positions, conceptualization of the proposal, decision-making processes, and the interpretation and dissemination of evidence and research results.”

The NSF stipulates that research funded by these grants should be designed to produce predetermined outcomes that benefit those engaged to conduct the research. 

“The proposed work should provide positive outcomes for the individuals and communities engaged and should recognize people’s humanity, experiences, and resilience,” according to the program description.  

A synopsis on the government’s grants.gov website shows $30 million will be awarded to an expected 45 grantees beginning in July.

Since President Biden took office, the NSF has awarded millions in grants related to equity, diversity and inclusion, a review of government spending by Just the News showed.

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Less Than Meets the Eye How admissions officers could be setting up minority students for failure James Piereson Naomi Schaefer Riley

By on May 9th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/scoreless-admissions-set-minority-students-up-for-failure

Admissions officers around the country can hardly contain themselves. With their schools seeing record numbers of applications and acceptances for minority students, they are taking a victory lap in the media.

“It is safe to say this is the most broadly diverse accepted class in the long history of Dartmouth,” Lee Coffin, vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions and financial aid at the school, told the Wall Street Journal. At Dartmouth, 48 percent of accepted students identify as black, indigenous, or other people of color, and 17 percent are the first in their families to attend college.

At New York University, this year’s class is about 29 percent black or Hispanic, up from 27 percent last year; it also includes 20 percent first-generation students, up from 15 percent. MJ Knoll-Finn, NYU’s senior vice president for enrollment management, sees the situation as historic. She told the New York Times: “You could tell the story of America through the eyes of all these young people, and how they dealt with the times, Black Lives Matter, the wave of unemployment and the uncertainties of the political moment, wanting to make a difference.”

Applications at Harvard were up 43 percent over last year, and the percentage of black students admitted went from 14.3 percent to 18 percent. William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid, enthused: “We have the most diverse class in the history of Harvard this year, economically and ethnically. . . . This is an incoming group of students who’ve had experiences unlike any experiences first-year students have had in the history of Harvard or history of higher education.”

The celebrations may have come too early. Many of these admissions decisions, administrators say, happened because their schools went “test-optional.” Dropping the requirement that students submit SAT or ACT scores meant that admissions officers could rely only on grades, essays, and recommendations. Thus students with lower scores may have been more willing to apply to schools they otherwise would have considered a reach.

Despite the shift of public opinion against them, SAT scores remain fairly good predictors of not only how well students will perform in college but also the difficulty of the classes they’ll take. “Students with high test scores are more likely to take the challenging route through college,” University of Minnesota psychologists Nathan Kuncel and Paul Sackett maintain.

Too often, young people admitted to demanding colleges wind up switching to easier, less remunerative majors. According to researchers at the University of Texas–Austin, “More than a third of black (40%) and Latino (37%) [STEM] students switch majors before earning a degree, compared with 29% of white STEM students.” While the authors of that study suggest that the reasons for this discrepancy are social rather than academic, the truth, as Purdue University researcher Samuel Rohr discovered, is that “a higher aggregate score on the SAT helped predict the retention of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and business students.” He concluded: “For every point increase in SAT, there was 0.3% increase in retention.”

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Human Rights Watch crosses a threshold Its latest attack on Israel goes beyond antisemitism. by Clifford May

By on May 8th, 2021

http://www.cliffordmay.org/25346/human-rights-watch-antisemitism

Antisemitism may be the world’s oldest hatred but it’s still a long way from death’s door. What I find particularly distressing, if not surprising, is to see self-proclaimed human rights activists demonizing the world’s most frequently threatened Jewish community.

I’m speaking, of course, about Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental – but not non-ideological – organization that has just published a 213-pagereport, “A Threshold Crossed,” declaring its “finding” that Israel is committing “crimes of apartheid,” which it calls “crimes against humanity” which, it adds, “should trigger action.”

In other words, HRW has arrogated to itself the authority to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury. They will leave to others the task of acting as executioners.

That’s not hyperbolic. Apartheid regimes are illegitimate. Illegitimate regimes should be abolished. HRW is therefore providing justification for those whose goal is the abolition of the world’s only Jewish-majority state, the refuge for Jews persecuted in or expelled from Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

Defenders of HRW might say, “They’re just urging Israelis to reform! Why can’t Israel emulate South Africa where the white minority turned over power to the black majority?”

For one, Israel is already a majority-rule nation. The 20 percent of Israeli citizens who identify as Palestinians or Israeli Arabs vote, run for office, hold seats in the Israeli parliament, serve as judges including on Israel’s Supreme Court, work as doctors in (not segregated) hospitals, attend (not segregated) universities, eat in (not segregated) restaurants, and relax on (not segregated) beaches. The same is true for Israeli Druze, Christians, Bedouins, Circassians, and other minorities about which HRW appears ignorant.

To call that apartheid requires twisting the meaning of the word beyond recognition – which HRW does. And it cannot have escaped HRW’s notice that in no other countries of the broader Middle East do ethnic and religious minorities enjoy similar rights and freedoms. Which means that the activists at HRW have chosen to apply a separate and unequal standard to Israel. That alone constitutes antisemitism.

Defenders of HRW might say, “Okay, but the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank are living under apartheid!”

False. Those are territories from which a war was launched against Israel in 1967. Israel survived and, in 2005, withdrew entirely from Gaza. Since 2007, Gaza’s Palestinians been ruled by Hamas which rejects even the possibility of peaceful co-existence with Israel. Hamas engages in acts of terrorism against Israelis daily while explicitly vowing to mass murder and/or drive Israeli Jews out of Israel.

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Communist China: World’s Biggest Climate Polluter Keeps Polluting by Judith Bergman

By on May 8th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17336/china-pollution-climate

If China were serious about reducing emissions, that intent would have been evident from its new five-year plan for the years 2021-2025, released in March. This plan, however, has been described as containing “little more than vague commitments to tackle carbon dioxide emissions.”
As the Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial in February, initiatives like this explain why “Beijing loves Biden and Paris”. They allow China, in the words of the editorial, to get “a free carbon ride” — meaning unfettered economic growth at a time when China is looking to become the world’s dominant economic and technological power.
How much will fulfilling President Biden’s climate accord pledges actually cost and for what actual benefit to whom, and how much of a further edge will it actually give to China?
At a time when China is so obviously saying one thing and doing another, and clearly not fulfilling its share of the world’s commitments to reducing CO2 emissions — as the world’s second-largest economy should — increasing America’s climate pledges sends all the wrong signals. What China and others see is that no matter what it does — even if it deceives the world and continues its predatory behavior — the US is willing to reduce its own competitiveness, leaving China a thick red carpet to become the world’s dominant superpower, the very role to which it aspires.

Communist China, in 2020, built over three times as much new coal power capacity as all other countries in the world combined — the equivalent of more than one large coal plant per week, according to a report released in April by Global Energy Monitor.

Also in 2020, China’s CO2 emissions rose by 1.5% while those of most other countries fell. Although, in 2020, the world retreated from coal, these retirements were eclipsed by China’s new coal plants.

Even before China built those new plants, it was already the world’s biggest emitter of fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2): In 2019, China was responsible for almost 30% of CO2 emissions — roughly twice the amount emitted by the US, then the second largest emitter. China, the planet’s primary coal consumer, already has the largest concentration of coal plants globally; in 2020, it produced 3.84 billion tons of coal, its highest output since 2015. In addition, China, in 2020, imported 304 million tons of coal, up 4 million tons from 2019.

According to the International Energy Agency, “79.7 percent of China’s emissions came from coal in 2018 compared to 70.6 percent in India, 25.8 percent in the United States, and 27.9 percent in the European Union” and “Since 2011, China has consumed more coal than the rest of the world combined.”

Despite being the world’s reigning climate polluter, China keeps virtue signaling, falsely marketing itself as the champion of the environment. “We should protect nature and preserve the environment like we protect our eyes, and endeavor to foster a new relationship where man and nature can both prosper and live in harmony,” said Xi Jinping at the recent Leaders Summit on Climate hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Cheney, the Caucus, and the Crux It is the role of the U.S. House GOP conference chairman to attack Democrats and aid Republicans, not vice versa. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

By on May 8th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/07/cheney-the-caucus-and-the-crux/

As of this writing, there is considerable doubt as to whether U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) should continue in her House Republican leadership position as its conference chairman. One scenario has her losing a caucus vote; another portends she will walk away from this internecine GOP battle and leave the position rather than betray her principles, most notably her opposition to the past and continued role of Donald Trump within the party. In either scenario, Cheney’s expected departure will be hailed by the corporate leftist media as the latest Republican martyrdom in the noble cause of resisting the cult of the “bad orange man.”

Is it? Cheney is not being run out of Congress. That is solely a matter for her Wyoming constituents to decide next year. Nor is Cheney being removed from her committee assignments; and her congressional office budget is not being reduced. Cheney is on the cusp of being replaced as conference chairman. Nothing more, nothing less. It is decidedly not the end of our free republic or of the Republican Party.

The conference chairman of the House Republican caucus is responsible for the development and implementation of the party’s unified messaging. In many ways, it is as if the House GOP is hiring one of its own to act as its PR director. One cannot overestimate how critical this position is for the House GOP conference. Past individuals who have held this position include former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and former Vice President Mike Pence (R-Ind.). 

This position—like all other House leadership positions in both parties—requires the confidence of one’s colleagues that the peer they elect will prioritize and actually put the interests of the caucus above her own. 

As a result, the election to leadership does not elevate a representative above his or her colleagues. Just as a general election subordinates the winner to the sovereign citizenry (i.e., the voters), a leadership election subordinates the winner to the caucus (i.e., the voters in Congress who choose that member to lead), individually and collectively. If someone in the leadership of either party places—or is perceived to be placing—a personal agenda ahead of the good of the conference, that individual has broken the implicit agreement upon which her delegated authority rests.

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The Disney Corp. has taken a deep dive into race hatred By Andrea Widburg

By on May 8th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/_the_disney_corp_has_taken_a_deep_dive_into_race_hatred.html

Going back to the late 1920s, every single child raised in America has intersected in some way with products from Walt Disney: We’ve watched the movies and TV shows, sung the songs, worn the clothes, and visited the theme parks. Through it all, Disney stood for wholesome family entertainment. That is no longer the case. Disney is a hardcore leftists corporation that is pushing its politics on children and training its employees to be white-hating racists or self-loathing white people. It’s time to give up Disney.

During Walt Disney’s tenure, his company also generated propaganda. Behind all the wonderful entertainment the company was pushing several themes: Heterosexual love is real, the nuclear family matters, American patriotism is important, and God is a beneficent presence in our lives.

Many parents and grandparents buying Disney videos for their children or taking family trips to the theme parks operate under the mistaken impression that this is still the case. They’re half right. Disney is still generating propaganda, but it’s about race and gender in ways many parents may not support.

Just the other day, we learned that Disney’s Pixar is planning to introduce a so-called “transgender” girl character for its next Toy Story movie. That means it is going to have a boy who thinks he’s a girl as a character in a movie aimed at little children. Disney’s also focused on gay characters in Onward and Out.

It turns out that these forays into pushing the cultural window further and further left are mere bagatelles compared to what’s going on behind the scenes. Journalist Christopher Rufo has become the go-to person for whistleblowers who want to expose their employers’ deep dives into Critical Race Theory. He received a doozy of a blown whistle about what’s happening in the Disney corporate offices, which are forcing employees to embrace CRT and gender madness.

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The Message Washington Needs to Hear Right Now: STOP! By Charles C. W. Cooke

By on May 8th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/the-message-washington-needs-to-hear-right-now-stop/

The disastrous jobs report is a flashing red warning for President Biden’s check-writing spree.

T he lesson of today’s jobs report is that President Biden should be spending less time fantasizing about becoming Franklin Roosevelt, and more time trying to avoid becoming Herbert Hoover.

It all happened so fast. At 8 a.m., CNN was echoing the likes of Warren Buffett, Larry Summers, and Janet Yellen in sounding the alarm about inflation. By 8.30 a.m., it had broken away to report the news that the April jobs report was an unmitigated disaster. The consensus had been that the data would show a million new jobs; the real number was less than a quarter of that. That, Axios noted, represented “the biggest miss, relative to expectations, in the history of the payrolls report.”

A lot of people said they were “shocked.” But why, exactly? Did they believe that Joe Biden had rendered gravity optional? This is what you get when you pay people not to work. It’s what you get when you send check after check after check to people who, were they permitted to, would be perfectly capable of regaining employment. It’s what you get when you allow the teachers’ unions to shut down the schools ad nauseam, and put working parents in a long-term bind. There is nothing magical about 2021, or about Joe Biden, or about this set of legislators and appointees and special interests. The same rules apply to them that applied to their predecessors. You can’t spend what you don’t have. You can’t tax and spend your way to prosperity. And human beings cannot be programmed out of responding to clear incentives. Call your plans whatever you want — Build Back Better, Modern Monetary Theory, Fairness, the Left-Handed Teacup Initiative — it doesn’t matter. Reality doesn’t care about branding.

The pigheadedness is stunning. The Treasury is spending twice what it’s taking in, we have a national debt that has eclipsed annual GDP for the first time since World War II, and, despite the abundance of recovered jobs, we are having a real problem getting people into them.

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China, Fauci and the Origins of Covid Did the virus come from a Chinese lab funded by the celebrated doctor’s U.S. government institute? James Freeman

By on May 8th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-fauci-and-the-origins-of-covid-11620419989?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Before Covid-19 ravaged the world, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded coronavirus research that included work at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The idea was to study the ability of such viruses to attack humans, but could a Fauci-funded experiment actually be the source of the deadly global infection? In an exhaustive account of the viral possibilities published this week by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nicholas Wade argues that the Chinese lab is the most likely source of the world-wide agony.

Left-leaning journalists who don’t like where this story is going may struggle to dismiss the author given his establishment credentials. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describes him this way:

Nicholas Wade is a science writer, editor, and author who has worked on the staff of Nature, Science, and, for many years, the New York Times.

The former Timesman writes:

The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped… it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.

Mr. Wade describes a key Chinese researcher whose work received support from Dr. Fauci’s institute via a U.S. group called EcoHealth Alliance:

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China’s leading expert on bat viruses, Shi Zheng-li or “Bat Lady,” mounted frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses…

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