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Ruth King

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Sends 2,000 Doses of a Covid-19 Vaccine to Palestinians The country is a leader in immunizations but could still be at risk if the virus keeps spreading in the West Bank and Gaza by Dov Lieber

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-sends-2-000-doses-of-a-covid-19-vaccine-to-palestinians-11612201397?mod=world_major_1_pos8

TEL AVIV—Israel transferred the first batch of a Covid-19 vaccine to the Palestinians amid growing concerns over the disease’s spread in the neighboring West Bank and Gaza becoming a threat to the country.

The Defense Ministry on Monday supplied 2,000 doses of Moderna Inc.’s vaccine to the Palestinian Authority, which governs part of the West Bank, Israeli officials said. Israel has agreed to give a total of 5,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccine to the Palestinians to inoculate front-line medical workers, they added.

The shipment was approved out of health concerns resulting from the mixing of Israeli and Palestinian populations, the officials said. A local committee of professional health advisers last week told the Israeli government that vaccinating the Palestinians is a “clear necessity” for Israel’s battle with the pandemic.

Israel two weeks ago had sent the Palestinian Authority 100 doses of a coronavirus vaccine for Palestinian health staff as a one-time humanitarian gesture, according to an Israeli security official.

Palestinian Authority officials couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.

Israel leads the world in vaccinating against Covid-19 in terms of percentage of the total population inoculated. It aims to vaccinate much of its population by March, but even if it succeeds, the coronavirus could still be a risk as long as it continues to spread in the West Bank and Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians enter Israel and the Jewish settlements in the West Bank for work, mainly in the construction sector, every day.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Burma’s Coup and Biden’s Choice The U.S. response needs to take into account China’s regional designs.

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/burmas-coup-and-bidens-choice-11612222727?mod=opinion_major_pos1

From protests in Moscow to Chinese air incursions over Taiwan, the world is wasting no time testing Joe Biden’s foreign policy team of liberal internationalists. On Monday Americans woke up to news of a swift and (so far) bloodless coup in Burma, whose transition to democratic government was touted by the Obama Administration as one of its major achievements.

Now the country’s generals are moving to reassert control after their party was walloped in November elections. Aung San Suu Kyi, the top elected leader of Burma (also called Myanmar), wanted to use her mandate to change the constitution to limit the generals’ power. That looks like the trigger for the military’s forced suspension of civilian government and communications blackout.

The Biden Administration is rightly denouncing the move, but the U.S. has limited leverage acting alone. The West has used market access as a carrot to urge Burma’s military rulers to cede power to Ms. Suu Kyi. Yet the extent that a power transition actually occurred was exaggerated. A return to economically isolating the country of 54 million on China’s southern border could hurt the Burmese people and play into Beijing’s hands.

As our Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2019, “Western fecklessness has made China look to Myanmar like a more stable and reliable partner.” President Trump’s great-power diplomacy was sometimes crudely transactional. Yet the Biden team might be tempted to pivot too far in the opposite direction, stressing liberal values at the expense of core American interests.

The top U.S. priority in Asia is limiting Beijing’s ability to control independent states like Burma, which is strategically situated in the Indo-Pacific. China is holding back from condemning the coup, likely in hopes of making diplomatic inroads with a military government.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: No to Normalization with the ‘Zionist entity’ by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17024/palestinians-normalization-israel

The anti-normalization campaign, which is also waged by Palestinians, means that any Palestinian leader or negotiator who is seen sitting with an Israeli will be condemned by Palestinians and possibly other Arabs as a traitor…. and accused of committing treason.

The last thing any Palestinian officials wants is to be labeled a traitor because, in the world of Fatah and Hamas, that crime is punishable by death.

If… Abbas wants to avoid such a fate, he must do an about-face and put an end to the anti-Israel incitement that is coming, first and foremost, from his very own loyalists.

If and when the Biden administration manages to revive the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, it will have to take into consideration that the Arab campaign against normalization with Israel remains as aggressive as ever.

The anti-normalization campaign, which is also waged by Palestinians, means that any Palestinian leader or negotiator who is seen sitting with an Israeli will be condemned by Palestinians and possibly other Arabs as a traitor.

Two recent examples of the ongoing campaign:

On January 6, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), a body dominated by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction and representing hundreds of Palestinian journalists, issued a warning to its members against engaging in normalization activities with Israelis.

The warning came in response to reports that the Israel Defense Forces had invited Palestinian journalists to participate in a Zoom briefing on Israel’s measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Some of the Palestinian journalists who reportedly received the invitation alerted the PJS, which swiftly issued the warning to all its members.

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BOOKS, HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

When a Far-Left, Female-Led Domestic Terrorism Group Bombed the U.S. Capitol Forgotten in the wake of January 6.

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/when-far-left-female-led-domestic-terrorism-group-lloyd-billingsley/

In the furor over the January 6 riot, which Sen. Mitt Romney called an “insurrection incited by the president of the United States,” a more serious assault on the Capitol has been overlooked. For those who weren’t around or may have forgotten, here’s what went down on the evening of November 7, 1983.

“Listen carefully, I’m only going to tell you this one time,” a caller from the “Armed Resistance Unit,” told the operator at the Capitol switchboard. “There is a bomb in the Capitol building. It will go off in five minutes. Evacuate the building.” A Senate document, “Bomb Explodes in Capitol,” describes what happened.

The caller warned that “a bomb had been placed near the chamber in retaliation for recent U.S. military involvement in Grenada and Lebanon.” At 10:58 p.m. “a thunderous explosion tore through the second floor of the Capitol’s north wing.” The device, hidden under a bench at the eastern end of the corridor outside the Senate chamber, “blew off the door to the office of Democratic Leader Robert C. Byrd.  The blast also punched a potentially lethal hole in a wall partition sending a shower of pulverized brick, plaster, and glass into the Republican cloakroom.” The adjacent halls were virtually deserted, so “many lives had been spared.”

Later than night, the Armed Resistance Unit called National Public Radio and proclaimed, “Tonight we bombed the U.S. Capitol.” The bombers “purposely aimed our attack at the institutions of imperialist rule rather than at individual members of the ruling class and government. We did not choose to kill any of them at this time. But their lives are not sacred and their hands are stained with the blood of millions.”

Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol is the title of the 2020 book by historian William Rosenau. In a Smithsonian magazine article headlined “In the 1980s a Far-Left, Female-Led Domestic Terrorism Group Bombed the U.S. Capitol,” Rosenau outlined the group’s back story.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

4 Democrat Conspiracy Theorists Who Should Be Denounced By Matt Margolis

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/columns/matt-margolis/2021/02/02/4-democrat-conspiracy-theorists-who-should-be-denounced-n1422485

At least 50 House Democrats have called for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s expulsion from Congress for her alleged embracing of QAnon conspiracy theories. PJM’s Tyler O’Neil recently called on conservatives and Republicans “to condemn Greene’s previous statements on social media and demand an explanation for them.”

I’m not here to condone anything she has said in the past. The problem is that unless those calling for her to be removed from office apply the same standard amongst Democrats, you won’t get me to endorse any punitive action against her. Some of her allegedly violent rhetoric isn’t all that dissimilar to the rhetoric we’ve heard from Democrats about Trump. Congressman Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.)  accused Trump of committing “innumerable crimes against the United States,” including “treason.” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) accused Trump of treason over the debunked Russian bounties story. Many other Democrats, including pundits, activists, and the media, have accused Trump of treason for various things. Death is, by federal law, an accepted punishment for treason.

But forget that, I could pick a Democrat in Congress at random and find something repulsive about him or her that has equal if not more justification for their removal. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s views on 9/11 and her blatant anti-Semitism, in particular, come to mind. And how many times was Ted Kennedy reelected to the U.S. Senate after killing a woman?

But I digress. Violent rhetoric from the left is a topic for another time. As for Marjorie Taylor Greene’s embrace of conspiracy theories, Democrat “outrage” aimed at her is the epitome of hypocrisy. Democrats have plenty of conspiracy theorists amongst their ranks that somehow never get called out by their own party or the media.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why We Still Need a Militia—and How to Build One It may seem ridiculous or paranoid, or simply unnecessary, to revive such an institution in a free society. But only a free society could support it. By Dan Gelernter

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/02/why-we-still-need-a-militia-and-how-to-build-one/

In an obscure but important footnote to the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wonders what would have become of the Soviet terror if the citizens of Russia had armed themselves with hammers, axes, pokers—anything—so that arresting officers of the NKVD would have had to worry whether they would survive each night. The most powerful tyranny in the world could not have stood up against such action. Instead, tens of millions of Russians submitted meekly to the state, one by one. Why?

The same question came up in my elementary school unit on the Holocaust—why did the Jews get onto the trains? Did they fail to understand what was in store for them? In my childhood mind, I tried to unravel questions that seemed as bitter as the fact of the Holocaust itself: Why was there no effective resistance? Was submission so ingrained in these people, or individual courage so lacking?

The answer in both cases is that it was not courage that was lacking, but organization. This concept glimmers through Solzhenitsyn’s description like a fleck of gold in the pebbly shallows of a stream: He imagines a group of neighbors, a half-dozen perhaps, lying in ambush downstairs for the secret policemen. He specifies a group of neighbors. He specifies collective action. One courageous man resisting alone is a suicide. But one courageous man leading a few of his friends can put up a fight.

The wording of our Second Amendment—or, rather, the placement of a single comma—has engendered a raging debate that reached the Supreme Court and persists to this day: Is the second clause of this all-important sentence operative, or dependent? Is the right to bear arms absolute, or does it exist only because of the need for a militia?

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Child Suicide, COVID-19, and the Unions By Larry Sand

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/02/child-suicide-covid-19-and-the-unions/
If teachers and their unions are truly concerned about dead kids, they should get back to work before the suicide rate for young people goes any higher.

The teachers’ unions’ resistance to opening schools is killing kids . . . literally.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about six percent of U.S. children aged 6 through 17 are afflicted with autism, severe anxiety, depression, trauma-related mental health conditions, and other serious emotional or behavioral difficulties. Due to forced school lockdowns, many of these children who depend on schools for access to vital therapies are being deprived.

So, it is not surprising that mental health problems account for a growing proportion of children’s visits to hospital emergency rooms. In November, the CDC reported that from March 2020, when the pandemic was declared, to October 2020, the figure was up 31 percent for those 12 to 17 years old and 24 percent for children ages 5 to 11, compared with the same period in 2019. And when severe mental health problems exist, suicides escalate.

The National Institutes of Health reports (pre-lockdown) about 70 children in the U.S., ages 5-14 kill themselves every year. While we don’t have national data yet for 2020, that reported number is likely to skyrocket. In Nevada’s Clark County alone, there were 18 youth suicides in the last nine months of 2020.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Did the Dems Have a Plan for the 2020 Election – Back in 2016? A reflection on what the Democrats did for Hillary in the 2016 primaries. Joseph Hippolito

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/did-dems-plan-rig-2020-election-2016-joseph-hippolito/

Buried underneath the reams of data, statistical analysis and affidavits that put the Democrats’ win in the recent presidential election in serious question, lies one salient fact:

The Democrats planned to rig that election regardless of whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton won in 2016, because the Democrats were rigging the 2016 primaries for Clinton.

Project Veritas revealed the Democrats’ scam that year in a two-part video series, “Rigging the Election.” The series not only shows how paid agitators attempted to disrupt Trump’s campaign, as FrontPage Magazine reported in “Capturing the False Flag.” It uncovers schemes to register ineligible voters and transport non-residents into neighboring states to vote.

All this took place with the full knowledge and consent of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton herself.

Though Project Veritas conducted its undercover investigation five years ago, the information is more than relevant today — especially given Joe Biden’s fraudulent status as President.

Scott Foval, a regional coordinator for People For the American Way and the owner of his own consulting firm at the time, admitted the DNC’s complicity in the 2016 rigging.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden’s New Asst Sec of State Worked for Islamic Terror State That Funds Hamas “I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada.” Daniel Greenfield

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/bidens-new-asst-sec-state-worked-islamic-terror-daniel-greenfield/

“I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” Hady Amr wrote a year after September 11, discussing his work as the national coordinator of the anti-Israel Middle East Justice Network.

Biden has now chosen Amr as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israel-Palestine.

“I have news for every Israeli,” Amr ranted in one column written after Sheikh Salah Shahada, the head of Hamas’ Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was taken out by an Israeli air strike.

Amr warned that Arabs “now have televisions, and they will never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children. And there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents.”

He also threatened Americans that “we too shouldn’t be shocked when our military assistance to Israel and our security council vetoes that keep on protecting Israel come back to haunt us”

The future State Department official was making these threats less than a year after 9/11.

Hady Amr had accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and coordinated an organization that had accused Israel of “apartheid” making his appointment, like that of Maher Bitar, an anti-Israel activist appointed as the Senior Director for Intelligence on the NSC, a statement about the Biden administration’s hostile relationship to the Jewish State.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘Systemic Racism’ and the Biden Administration By Peter Kirsanow

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/systemic-racism-and-the-biden-administration/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second

The first two weeks of the Biden administration have been dominated by promotion of “racial equity” and eradication of “systemic racism.”

Setting aside the fact that structural/institutional/systemic racism is largely a canard, and the administration’s invocation thereof is primarily a tool to expand progressives’ power, there’s one inarguable case of systemic racism that the administration could address, but likely won’t: the blatant and staggering discrimination against Asian Americans in college and grad-school admissions.

The Trump Justice Department filed a brief supporting the appeal to the Supreme Court by Asian-American students who maintain that Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans in admissions. Evidence adduced in the case shows, e.g., that the combined SAT scores of Asian Americans admitted to Harvard between 2010 and 2015 were 218 points higher than those of similarly situated black admittees. Similar disparities, including those involving GPAs, occur in colleges throughout the country.

It’s widely expected that the Biden administration will switch the government’s position on the case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. If it does, that will tell you all you need to know about the administration’s concerns about systemic racism.

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