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Ruth King

American Synagogue Under Siege Here’s how to fight back. Charles Jacobs and Ben Poser

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/american-synagogue-under-siege-heres-how-fight-frontpagemagcom/

In an outrage to the Jewish community, it has apparently become acceptable for people to picket synagogue services, and accuse the Jews inside of murder, imperialism, and the very acts of genocide visited upon them by the Nazis.

The members of Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, endure the vile taunts of protesters holding signs reading “Resist Jewish Power,” “Jewish Power Corrupts,” “No More Holocaust Movies,” “Boycott Israel,” “Stop U.S. Aid to Israel,” and “End the Palestinian Holocaust” every Shabbat. What’s more, this unconscionable behavior has not just been the weekly norm recently, but every single Shabbat (Saturday) since 2003.

“They portray themselves as kindly types who bring their detractors tea and wish them a nice day, while they espouse Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic global conspiracy theories… And their hate fails to alarm some progressive leaders who would be rightfully shouting from the rooftops if this were a mosque,” Beth Israel’s rabbi, Nadav Caine, told Ryan Stanton of Michigan Live.

The local protest group in question, Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends, is led by Henry Hirskovitz: “We’re not there because they’re Jews. We’re there because they’re Jewish Zionists,” he told the same reporter. Hirskovitz, apparently a former congregant who fell out with the temple due to political differences, leads an organization whose website proudly features a picture of a woman holding a sign saying, “Zionists Picnic While Palestinians Starve. The World is Watching.” This is Jewish anti-Semitism at its purest.

Trump Doubles Support Among Young Black Voters Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/10/trump-doubles-support-among-young-black-voters-daniel-greenfield/

“Trump has also gained real ground among nonwhite voters. To be clear, he still trails Biden considerably with these groups, but in UCLA Nationscape’s polling over the past month, he was down by 39 points with these voters, a double-digit improvement from his 53-point deficit in 2016.

While older Black voters look as if they’ll vote for Biden by margins similar to Clinton’s in 2016, Trump’s support among young Black voters (18 to 44) has jumped from around 10 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in UCLA Nationscape’s polling.”

How Trump Might Be Winning By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-trump-might-be-winning/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

I’m far too dumb to be able to shed any light on polls, but I do know something about celebrity and I think I can guarantee this: If President Trump wins re-election, Robert Cahaly is going to become very famous very quickly.

Who is Robert Cahaly? The chief pollster for the Trafalgar Group, the only major polling organization that publishes its results and correctly predicted Donald Trump’s 2016 victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Cahaly predicts Trump is again going to win Michigan, along with Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Texas. He calculates that Trump will be reelected with roughly 280 electoral votes.

You can, and should, listen to Cahaly make these bold predictions on a special edition of The Editors podcast in which Rich Lowry interviews Cahaly for an hour (he writes about it here). I’ve been bobbing along with the conventional wisdom that says Trump is headed for a blowout defeat in the popular vote and the Electoral College, but Cahaly has a completely different take. It’s wild.

The pollster says that he employs different methods from his competitors and warns that the others are badly underestimating how social-desirability bias is artificially inflating Joe Biden’s numbers. People who hate Trump are willing, indeed eager, to give up their time to talk about how much they hate Trump, according to this view. And some polls take a long time, offering a slate of 20 or 25 questions to go through. You have to really want your opinion to be counted if you’re willing to give away that much of your time for nothing.

Trouble in Putin’s Neighborhood Chaos in Russia’s near-abroad shows the limits of Kremlin power.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trouble-in-putins-neighborhood-11603149025?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Changes to the Russian constitution approved earlier this year allow Vladimir Putin to remain president well into his 80s. While he has consolidated power at home, one of the little-remarked events of the year has been the authoritarian’s inability to stop disorder in Russia’s near-abroad.

In 2005 Mr. Putin said “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” More than a decade later, the former KGB officer mused that if he could go back in time he would prevent the 1991 collapse. The USSR isn’t coming back, but the Russian Federation still tries to maintain stability on its periphery through deep economic, military and cultural ties with former Soviet Republics.

This project hasn’t been going well, even in countries that generally view Moscow favorably. The latest headache comes from Russian ally Kyrgyzstan. Opposition parties accused ruling elites of voter fraud after Oct. 4 parliamentary elections, and chaos continued even after the results were annulled last week.

President Sooronbai Jeenbekov announced his resignation Thursday. The nationalist Sadyr Japarov, newly sprung from prison, has become prime minister and acting president. But a Kremlin spokesman said Thursday that Russia would pause economic support for Bishkek because “there is no government as such, as far as we see.” Mr. Putin has reason to worry about instability in the resource-rich country, which hosts a strategically important Russian air base.

‘Crosswinds’ Review: Middle East Balancing Act An exploration of the Saudi temper that has both the interpretative heft of scholarship and the anecdotal brilliance of literary travelogue. By Martin Peretz

https://www.wsj.com/articles/crosswinds-review-middle-east-balancing-act-11603149873?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

Search for recent news articles about Saudi Arabia and the first name certain to appear is that of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and inside player of Saudi power politics who was exiled from the kingdom, became an outspoken critic of the House of Saud, and in October 2018 met his gruesome end in an ambush inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul—an attack about which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denies any foreknowledge. The Khashoggi incident was met by world-wide revulsion; it’s been a blow to Saudi Arabia’s reputation that, in comparison to those of the kingdom’s neighbors, is warranted but not deserved. Every day, for example, more evidence surfaces of the top-down human-rights abuses in Iran and the unending human wreckage caused by the Syrian genocide. Still, Khashoggi’s fate has become a more potent symbol than either of these, emblematic of an increasingly hardline, conservative regime that the American foreign-policy establishment, and much of the American public, dislikes and distrusts.

Actions don’t exist outside of contexts. Insisting on a less myopic look at Saudi Arabia doesn’t mean excusing Khashoggi’s murder, but it does mean contextualizing it, bringing to it an analytical commitment to complexity too often attenuated in our times. This is the indirect achievement of “Crosswinds,” a posthumous book by Fouad Ajami that makes sense of the Saudi kingdom on its own terms—terms dense and tense with possibilities.

The Lebanon-born Ajami, who died in 2014 at age 68, was director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and America’s most prominent pragmatic idealist about the possibilities of liberalization in the Middle East. “Crosswinds,” completed in 2010 and drawing on 30 years of anecdote and analysis, attempts to gauge those possibilities in Saudi Arabia, not as an apologia for the kingdom but as a corrective to facile critiques.

In this work, more penetrating than argumentative and more deepening than sweeping, Ajami shows that behind its deliberately opaque exterior, modern Saudi Arabia has been defined by the calibration of tensions between competing forces: deep conservatism and yearnings for modernity; the ferocity of radicalism and the dependability of oil revenues; pressures from America to move left and from Iran to move right. The role of the monarchy in negotiating these crosswinds implicitly repudiates the brutal despotic repressions of regional neighbors like Iran and Syria: the Saudis may be authoritarians but they are also pragmatists.

U.S.-Sponsored Arab-Israeli Rapprochement Gaining Steam By P. David Hornik See note please

https://pjmedia.com/columns/p-david-hornik/2020/10/19/u-s-sponsored-arab-israeli-rapprochement-gaining-steam-n1067479

David Hornik is one of the best commentators and writers in Israel today. He is also a wonderful writer of fiction and his new novel is: “And Both Shall Row.”

On September 15, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain signed a U.S.-sponsored deal in Washington on normalizing relations between Israel and the two Arab Gulf states.

Since then things have been moving fast. On Sunday, at a ceremony in Bahrain’s capital of Manama, Israel and Bahrain inked an agreement formally establishing diplomatic ties between them. It was accompanied by memoranda on cooperation in a wide range of fields from aviation to agriculture. The U.S. was represented by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who called the signings “a remarkable accomplishment.”

Things are moving forward with the UAE as well. Also on Sunday, Israel and the UAE agreed to enable 28 weekly flights between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi. Calling it “one of the first, important fruits of the peace agreement,” Israel’s Transportation Ministry said the flights would smooth the way to “tourism, trade, and business between the countries.”

It’s all a far cry from the days of the “Arab-Israeli conflict,” when the Arab states were perceived — not entirely accurately, but considerably so — as a united bloc of hostility toward Israel.

With the Trump administration claiming it’s hard at work on further normalization deals between Israel and Arab countries, speculation centers on which of those countries may be next.

Election Interference? Big Tech Censored Trump More Than 60 Times, Left Biden Unscathed By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/10/19/election-interference-big-tech-censored-trump-more-than-60-times-left-biden-unscathed-n1068955

Is Big Tech interfering in the 2020 election? If so, tech companies did not start with the suppression of The New York Post‘s Hunter Biden bombshell story last week — although that act was arguably the most egregious.

Facebook and Twitter have censored President Donald Trump or his reelection campaign 65 times but have not censored Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his campaign a single time, according to a new report from the Media Research Center’s (MRC) Techwatch.

Techwatch analyzed two years of social media posts from Trump, Biden, and their respective campaigns, between May 2018 and October 16, 2020. The analysis did not include any ads from political action committees (PACs) or super PACs in support of Trump or Biden. It also focused on social media posts, not paid advertisements, from the campaigns.

Twitter

Twitter labeled, fact-checked, and removed tweets from the president and his campaign 64 times since Trump’s election in 2016. The company appears to have ramped into high gear this past May.

Twitter put “public interest” notices on Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting, COVID-19, and the Black Lives Matter protests. The company deleted a satirical video retweeted by the president following a fact-check from the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact. The company also deleted three Trump tweets about hydroxychloroquine on July 28, 2020.

Twitter has also cracked down on memes that Trump tweeted or retweeted. The company removed a meme from his June 30 tweet showing the president saying, “In reality, they’re not after me. They’re after you.” Logan Cook, a meme creator who goes by the handle Carpe Donktum, made a video mocking the Democrats’ reaction to Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address. After Trump retweeted it, Twitter removed the video following a copyright complaint. Twitter also removed a Carpe Donktum video showing two toddlers hugging one another with fake CNN chyrons at the bottom after Trump retweeted it.

Pennsylvania Rejects 372,000 Mail-in Ballot Applications, as Voters Err By Matthew Vadum

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pennsylvania-rejects-372k-mail-in-ballot-applications-as-voters-err_3543483.html

The presidential election battleground state of Pennsylvania has rejected 372,000 requests for mail-in ballots, a development that is causing confusion among election officials and the voting public.

Pennsylvania is among the most hotly contested states for the Nov. 3 presidential election. President Donald Trump narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2016 by 44,292 votes out of more than 6 million cast. The Republican candidate secured 48.2 percent of the popular vote in the state, beating Democrat Hillary Clinton, who won 47.5 percent, according to Ballotpedia.

Pennsylvania has 20 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to be elected president.

Voting-by-mail, whether by absentee ballot or by the military overseas, has been around for many years, but the current pandemic has made it a significantly more popular means for discharging one’s democratic duty. It allows the voter to take action without risking exposure to the CCP virus that causes the disease COVID-19 by attending a polling place in person.

The revelation of the rejected ballot applications highlights the reportedly widespread public anxiety about using the U.S. Postal Service as a primary means of conducting elections in the country, something that has never been attempted before.

It also highlights the difficulties in switching from largely voting in person to voting by mail, without sufficient time allowed to educate the public about how to complete the sometimes confusing mail-in balloting paperwork properly.

Pennsylvania officials blame the denials largely on duplicate requests initiated by voters who recently applied for mail-in ballots without knowing that they had already applied for the ballots during the June primary elections.

The Biden Corruption Scandal Isn’t About Hunter, It’s About Joe The Hunter Biden scandal indicates that Joe Biden, while vice president of the United States, knowingly allowed his son to sell access to the Obama administration, then lied about it.By Margot Cleveland

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/19/the-biden-corruption-scandal-isnt-about-hunter-its-about-joe/

Hunter Biden’s addiction is not the issue. Joe Biden’s addiction is: His addiction to power and money. And it is the evidence of the former vice president’s corruption, and the national security risk our country would face by electing Biden, that is the story of the MacBook hard drive, not the salacious, verified photographs and videos of Hunter Biden.

For nearly a week, corporate media successfully ignored or downplayed news of the trove of Hunter Biden’s emails, texts, photographs, and videos recovered from a laptop abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store. Then confirmation of the authenticity of the materials first reported in the New York Post, and the release of a second set of emails — also confirmed— from another source finally forced the press to acknowledge the issue.

On Friday evening, CBS News’ Bo Erickson asked Joe Biden about the New York Post story as the Democrat candidate for president departed from a campaign stop in Michigan. “I have no response. It’s another smear campaign — right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask,” Biden snipped at the long-time reporter.

With more details coming out daily, this non-answer will not placate even a compliant press for long. Nor will the “Russia disinformation” narrative pushed by Biden’s media boosters suffice because multiple confirmations of the evidence establish this story is not disinformation.

It’s Not about Hunter’s Addiction, It’s about Joe’s

Jeffrey Toobin Suspended by The New Yorker After Exposing Himself on Zoom Toobin claims he thought his camera was off:By Bonnie Stiernberg

https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/internet/jeffrey-toobin-new-yorker-suspended

We’ve all accidentally left ourselves on mute during a Zoom meeting before, but this is, uh, a bit more extreme. Vice reports that the New Yorker has suspended reporter Jeffrey Toobin after he exposed himself on a Zoom call last week between members of the publication and WNYC radio that’s being referred to as the “Zoom Dick Incident.”

Toobin insists it was an accident, claiming he thought his camera was turned off (though he offered no explanation for why his dick would be out during a work call in the first place).

 “I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera,” he said in a statement to Vice. “I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers. I believed I was not visible on Zoom. I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video.”

Toobin’s Conde Nast email has been disabled, and he has not tweeted since Oct. 13. New Yorker spokesperson Natalie Raabe confirmed he has been suspended, saying, “Jeffrey Toobin has been suspended while we investigate the matter.”

He did, however, appear on CNN, where he is the network’s chief legal analyst, as recently as Saturday. The network told Vice that Toobin has been granted leave. “Jeff Toobin has asked for some time off while he deals with a personal issue, which we have granted,” CNN said in a statement.