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Ruth King

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France’s Determination to End Free Speech by Judith Bergman

By on May 26th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16057/france-free-speech

Private companies will now be obliged to act as thought police on behalf of the French state or face heavy fines.

“Under the pretext of fighting ‘hateful’ content on the Internet, it [the Avia law] is setting up a system of censorship that is as effective as it is dangerous… ‘hate’ is the pretext systematically used by those who want to silence dissenting opinions…. A democracy worthy of its name should accept freedom of expression.” — Guillaume Roquette, editorial director of Le Figaro Magazine, May 22, 2020.

“What is hate? You have the right not to love… you have the right to love, you have the right to hate. It’s a feeling… It cannot be judicialized, legislated.” — Éric Zemmour, CNews, May 13, 2020.

Asking private companies — or the government — to act as thought police does not belong in a state that claims to follow a democratic rule of law. Unfortunately, the question is not whether France will be the last European country to introduce such censorship laws, but what other countries are next in line.

On May 13, the French parliament adopted a law that requires online platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat[1] to remove reported “hateful content” within 24 hours and “terrorist content” within one hour. Failure to do so could result in exorbitant fines of up to €1.25 million or 4% of the platform’s global revenue in cases of repeated failure to remove the content.

The scope of online content deemed “hateful” under what is known as the “Avia law” (after the lawmaker who proposed it) is, as is common in European hate speech laws, very broadly demarcated and includes “incitement to hatred, or discriminatory insult, on the grounds of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or disability”.

The French law was directly inspired by Germany’s controversial NetzDG law, adopted in in October 2017, and it is explicitly mentioned in the introduction to the Avia law.

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Iran: The Ayatollah, Amid Coronavirus, Calls for Jihad Against the Jewish State by Majid Rafizadeh

By on May 26th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16062/iran-khamenei-jihad-israel

It is mystifying that Twitter, which wantonly censors so much, continues to allow… Iranian leaders to spread Nazi-inspired language and anti-Semitic sentiments on its platform. In general, “Big Tech” — Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter — have long since ceased being “neutral” transmitters of information as if they were “utilities”. Instead, they have become America’s Thought Police. They urgently need to be regulated the same way media is.

The ruling mullahs of Iran need to be held accountable by the international community for threatening to annihilate a fellow- member of the United Nations, the Jewish state. Not only are these threats unacceptable according to Chapter I: Article 2(1)-(5) of the Charter of the United Nations… They are also unacceptable as part of a double-standard in which the United Nations and the international community continue to be silent about Iran’s threats against Israeli citizens — not to mention Iran’s malign actions against its own citizens. Perhaps the time… is long overdue… for the U.S. to cease funding the UN, which seems only to conserve injustice and war.

Under no circumstances should the US, the UN or any other entity — read: Europe — in any way be assisting the malign mullahs of Iran.

Instead of concentrating on assisting and improving the living standards of its citizens, the ruling mullahs of Iran seem to be prioritizing the advancement of their anti-Semitic agenda.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently called Israel a “cancerous tumor to be destroyed,” promised “to support any nation or group that fights Israel,” and urged the Palestinian militant groups to cooperate more closely with each other and “expand the field of jihad in all Palestinian lands.”

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Jordanian King Abdullah’s Empty Threats Trying to stand in the way of President Trump’s peace plan. Caroline Glick

By on May 26th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/jordanian-king-abdullahs-empty-threats-caroline-glick/

Should Jordan’s King Abdullah have veto power over Israel’s plan to apply its sovereign laws to its cities, towns and villages in Judea and Samaria and to the Jordan Valley, in accordance with the Trump peace plan? Just recently, senior leaders of Israel’s Blue and White Party began making noises to that effect.

In an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel last week, King Abdullah threatened, “If Israel really annexes the West Bank in July, it would lead to a massive conflict with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.”

Subsequent news updates reported that “senior officials” from Blue and White were working to condition Israel’s implementation of the sovereignty plan on securing prior approval from Jordan.

During the ceremony at the Foreign Ministry marking the arrival of incoming Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi, Ashkenazi said that Israel will implement the Trump peace plan “in dialogue with our neighbors, [and while] preserving of the peace treaties and the State of Israel’s strategic interests.”

Taken together with these news updates, Ashkenazi’s remarks raised the prospect that he and his partner, Defense Minister and vice prime minister Benny Gantz see Abdullah’s threat as a justification for abandoning their support for the sovereignty plan. It bears recalling that during the negotiations leading up to the formation of the unity government between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Likud and Gantz and Blue and White, Netanyahu made Blue and White’s support for the sovereignty plan his only substantive condition for signing the deal.

Abdullah, of course, will never approve the sovereignty plan, so giving him a veto means shelving the plan. This raises the question of whether there is any reason to give the head of the Hashemite clan that sort of power. Can he cause Israel harm so grave that it should abandon the sovereignty plan to appease him?

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The Donald and the Dow By Sheldon Roth

By on May 26th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/the_donald_and_the_dow.html

Sheldon Roth, M.D., a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is author of recently published Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump.

The Ouija Board of Stock Market Indices

Trump-supporters felt anxiety as they watched recent White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefings.  In the face of disruption, disease, and death, the president confidently hyped stock market averages as victory.  In an April briefing, Trump was unequivocal: “The market is smart.  The market is actually brilliant…they’re viewing it like we’ve done a good job.  They view it that way.”

This disconnect — from lives ravaged by death, unemployment, zombification of cities and towns, and an unknown future — is hard to bear and set aside.  For loyal supporters, it is especially painful since oppositional media often rebuke Trump’s showcasing the stock market as evidence of his success: “[During his presidency] Mr. Trump has obsessed over the daily gyrations of the stock market like no president before him.  He trumpeted its relentless rise as a validation of his leadership, his financial acumen and his policies.  Disappointing days were the fault of Democrats, the media or the Federal Reserve” (The New York Times).

President Trump’s Basic Motivation

How can we understand Trump’s monocular view?  What drives his steadfast trust in economics?  If you are thinking strictly along familiar lines of money, politics, power, or greed, you miss the central emotional determinant: love.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academia Bows to Islamic Terror By Paul Miller and Abraham H. Miller

By on May 26th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/academia_bows_to_islamic_terror.html

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, but not everyone shares in the cost.

Even fewer comprehend that the threat to our democracy is more likely to come from the internal erosion of our civic institutions than from external forces.

The most corrupting influence on our democracy is rooted in political correctness in our education system. Whereas there once was an emphasis on civic education as a means to imbue the citizenry with the values of the Constitution, that emphasis has long been diminished.

From elementary school through college, basic requirements in American history and civics have been replaced by political trendiness.

Consequently, it is not surprising that our educational system has produced generation after generation of college administrators who suffer from an embarrassing ignorance of the fundamental political values of the republic.

These present-day Gletkins (the character who embodied the ideology of Stalinism in Arthur Koestler’s classic, Darkness at Noon) have been suckled on a steady diet of political correctness, and so it follows that they are quick to trample basic liberty when it gets in the way of political expediency.

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The COVID-19 shutdown will cost Americans millions of years of life By Scott W. Atlas, John R. Birge, Ralph L Keeney and Alexander Lipton

By on May 26th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/499394-the-covid-19-shutdown-will-cost-americans-millions-of-years-of-life

Our governmental COVID-19 mitigation policy of broad societal lockdown focuses on containing the spread of the disease at all costs, instead of “flattening the curve” and preventing hospital overcrowding. Although well-intentioned, the lockdown was imposed without consideration of its consequences beyond those directly from the pandemic. 

The policies have created the greatest global economic disruption in history, with trillions of dollars of lost economic output. These financial losses have been falsely portrayed as purely economic. To the contrary, using numerous National Institutes of Health Public Access publications, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and various actuarial tables, we calculate that these policies will cause devastating non-economic consequences that will total millions of accumulated years of life lost in the United States, far beyond what the virus itself has caused.

Pandemics have afflicted humankind throughout history. They devastated the Roman and Byzantine empires, Medieval Europe, China and India, and they continue to the present day despite medical progress. 

The past century has witnessed three pandemics with at least 100,000 U.S. fatalities: The “Spanish Flu,” 1918-1919, with between 20 million and 50 million fatalities worldwide, including 675,000 in the U.S.; the “Asian Flu,” 1957-1958, with about 1.1 million deaths worldwide, 116,000 of those in the U.S.; and the “Hong Kong Flu,” 1968-1972,  with about 1 million people worldwide, including 100,000 in the U.S. So far, the current pandemic has produced almost 100,000 U.S. deaths, but the reaction of a near-complete economic shutdown is unprecedented.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Let’s blame China Much of the western media is behaving like a subsidiary of the Chinese Communist party Roger Kimball

By on May 26th, 2020

https://spectator.us/blame-china-communist-wuhan-coronavirus/

Is Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Hillary Clinton in drag? I ask because when he takes to the pages of the Washington Post to lecture us that ‘It is time to end the blame game’ with respect to China’s role in helping to spread the coronavirus, I could almost believe I was back at that Congressional hearing after Muslim lunatics attacked the American consulate in Benghazi and murdered four Americans, including the US ambassador. The dulcet strains of the then Secretary of State Clinton skirling ‘at this point what difference does it make?’ are ringing in my ears. It’s ‘time to move on’, she said later, just as China’s ambassador half-pleaded, half-warned about the ‘mindset’ urging a ‘decoupling’ of America from China. ‘The United States would not emerge as a winner from this scenario,’ he said.

Ambassador Cui writes that: ‘China has done its best to share information about the virus.’ Ha, ha, ha. In fact, it dissembled about the nature of the virus, obscuring the date of the first cases, insisting that there was no human-to-human transmission, even as, in mid-January, it ordered its consulates around the world to stock up on face masks and other protective gear in anticipation of a global outbreak. Chinese doctors and scientists who tried to sound the alarm early on suddenly disappeared, even as the regime destroyed evidence and stonewalled requests from western scientists for firsthand information about the earliest victims. Ambassador Cui is paid to lie for his country. We do not have to be naive and believe him.

But many of us do. Much of the western media is behaving like the World Health Organization, i.e., like a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist party. As Bill Gertz points out in his just-published book How China’s Communist Party Made the World Sick, China’s behavior regarding the coronavirus is like the Soviet Union’s behavior after the deadly explosion at the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl. ‘The Chinese lied to cover up a major natural disaster — only now the damage is not simply the irradiation of an area in and around a city in Ukraine. The Chinese have inflicted grave damage on the world economy and put half the world’s population out of work, at least temporarily.’

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Imported Chips Make America’s Security Vulnerable In response, the U.S. needs better engineering to detect sabotage and a move to more domestic production.By Adam A. Scher and Peter L. Levin

By on May 26th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/imported-chips-make-americas-security-vulnerable-11590430851?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

America’s digital infrastructure has been a crucial part of the response to the Covid-19 crisis. But what if it becomes a problem? Semiconductors underlie many things we take for granted and desperately need: telecommunications, remote industrial controls, emergency services, and transportation and fleet-management networks. If a digital catastrophe hit, Americans could lose access to electricity, water and banking. The military could be exposed. The continuity of government could be broken. The basic fabric of modern life would take years to recover.

There are three primary causes of America’s pernicious cyber vulnerability: manufacturing economics, advances in microfabrication, and new design paradigms. For the past 25 years, industry’s focus has been on compliance to behavioral specifications—on doing things right. Now it has to consider whether the chips designed at home but built overseas are doing the right things. A deliberate manipulation by a foreign enemy could be worse than a viral infection, and would dramatically reshape great-power competition.

U.S. supply chains are fragile and not secure. And no one seriously considered the possibility that factories themselves could, or would, manipulate the product to a foreign power’s advantage. But for modern devices composed of 40 billion transistors, the opportunity for mischief is tremendous. Each transistor can be in one of two states: on or off. That means the number of possible states for the most complicated processors is the inconceivably large number of 2 raised to the 40 billionth power. Checking every transistor, every possibility, for malfeasance is a hopeless task.

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Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Dock A Constitutional Contradiction Emerges in a Country Without a Constitution

By on May 26th, 2020

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/prime-minister-netanyahu-in-the-dock/91145/

What a spectacle is underway in Israel, where Prime Minister Netanyahu is being prosecuted by his own government for bribery and other crimes that he was formally alleged to have committed before he was re-elected to a third term. It’s a lesson in constitutional conundrums from a country that doesn’t have a constitution — and not just because Mr. Netanyahu has entered the dock with all saddlebags flapping in the breeze.

“Netanyahu’s Defense Strategy Is to Undermine His Accuser, the State of Israel,” is the way the poser was put in Israel’s leading liberal daily, Haaretz, as the trial was getting underway. A country doesn’t have to have a constitution, it seems, for its headline writers to comprehend the implicit constitutional contradiction. Here in America, we’ve been marking the point as a special counsel pursued, in President Trump, his own boss.

In America, of course, there are ways around this problem. One would have been for President Trump to fire the prosecutor for trying to prosecute him in a way the President didn’t like. Mr. Trump was more forbearing, and merely unleashed tornados of tweets against Robert Mueller, until the prosecutor cleared him of collusion with the Russians. Another method for dealing with the predicament is impeachment. It, too, cleared Mr. Trump.

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HISTORY Comments turned off

 Shavou’ot (Pentecost) guide for the perplexed, 2020 Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on May 26th, 2020

1. Impact on the formation of the US

The holiday of Shavou’ot (Pentecost) commemorates the legacy of Moses – the Exodus, the Ten Commandments and the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) -which had a significant impact on the key values and achievements of the Early Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers: the US Revolution, Federalist Papers, US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, etc. 

2. The Liberty Bell  

Shavou’ot is the holiday of liberty/Exodus, as highlighted by the Biblical concept of Jubilee – the cornerstone of Biblical liberty – which is inscribed on the Liberty Bell: “Proclaim liberty upon the earth and unto all the inhabitants thereof (Leviticus 25:10).” The Liberty Bell was installed in Philadelphia in 1752, 50 years following William Penn’s Charter of Privileges, inspiring the 50 States in the union. The Biblical Jubilee is commemorated every 50 years, releasing slaves and returning land property to the original proprietors. Shavou’ot is celebrated 50 days following Passover, and Pentecost – a derivative of the Greek word for 50 – is celebrated 50 days following Easter.  According to Judaism, there are 50 gates of wisdom, studied during the 50 days between Passover and Shavou’ot.

3. The Scroll of Ruth. Honor thy mother in-law…

Shavou’ot spotlights the Scroll of Ruth, the first of the five Biblical scrolls, which are studied during five Jewish holidays: Ruth (Shavou’ot), Song of Songs (Passover), Ecclesiastes (Sukkot/Tabernacles), Book of Lamentations (the Ninth day of Av), Esther (Purim). Ruth was a Moabite Princess, the great grandmother of King David, the son of Jesse and the grandson of Ovad, who was the son of Ruth.

Ruth was a role model of loyalty to her Jewish mother in-law (“Your people are my people and your G-d is my G-d”), humility, gratitude, responsibility, reliability, respect of the fellow human beings, faith and optimism. According to the Bible, Ruth, the daughter-in-law, was better than seven sons. Ruth stuck by her mother-in-law, Naomi, during Naomi’s roughest time, when the latter lost her husband, Elimelech (a President of the Tribe of Judah), two sons and property. Just like Job, Naomi bounced back from the lowest ebb of ordeal to fulfilled hope.  Job and Naomi went through family, economic and social calamities, lost their spouses, children and financial assets; both retained confidence in G-d and reconstructed their families; both became symbols of conviction over convenience, faith-driven patience and endurance.

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