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Ruth King

Iran Tortures U.S. Hostage for Days as Zakka Refuses to ‘Capitulate to Pressure’ from Captors By Bridget Johnson

https://pjmedia.com/yellowribbonproject/contact-ceases-with-u-s-hosta

An American hostage held by Iran for 1,197 days lost contact with his family nearly two weeks ago, raising fears that Nizar Zakka — already in frail health — may have been removed from his cell to be subjected to torture.

Zakka was heard from again briefly today, according to his attorney, confirming days of punishment at the hands of the Iranians for refusing to relent to their demands.

Zakka visited Tehran in September 2015 at the invitation of the Iranian government to speak at a conference on women’s entrepreneurship and employment, and was seized as he tried to catch a return flight to Washington. The State Department even helped fund his trip, according to his colleagues.

He was sentenced to 10 years on espionage charges a year after his arrest, and his family warned months ago that Zakka is in “very bad health.”

Zakka, a Lebanese-American and permanent U.S. resident, is secretary-general of the D.C.-based IJMA3 group, which lobbies for the information and communications technology industry in the Middle East. Zakka earned degrees from the University of Texas after graduating from the Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Ga., in 1985. He used to work as a software engineer at contractor Kellogg, Brown & Root in the early ’90s.

Since being invited and kidnapped, Zakka has weathered six protest hunger strikes — all while lobbying on behalf of fellow inmates to improve their conditions and refusing to film any propaganda “confession” video for the Iranians.

Early this year, an Iranian doctor hired by Zakka’s family said the hostage may have cancer, but Iranian authorities were not allowing necessary diagnostics. CONTINUE AT SITE

BETO O’ROURKE ON THE CASTING COUCH FOR 2020

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/423138-orourke-releases-video-ripping-trumps-border-wall

Outgoing Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) on Friday released a 48-second video ripping President Trump’s demand for a border wall.

O’Rourke’s video, posted on Twitter, listed negative consequences from constructing a wall, asserting it would block access to the Rio Grande River, lead to land seizures through eminent domain, make land inaccessible between the Rio Grande and the wall and seal off wildlife corridors.

“The southern border already has over 600 miles of wall and fence. And since 2007, the undocumented population has grown more through visa overstays than unauthorized border crossings. We need realistic immigration reform, not a symbol of division,” the video concludes.

O’Rourke emerged as a vocal critic to Trump during his Senate bid this year, even suggesting that he would vote to impeach the president if such a motion came to the House floor.

His insurgent campaign to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sparked speculation that the Texas Democrat could make for a potential 2020 challenger to Trump.

O’Rourke’s supporters point to his 3-point defeat in the ruby red state and his ability to energize the Democratic base and rake in a record amount of contributions.

His video released Friday comes as lawmakers continue to remain at odds over funding for Trump’s border wall in a deal to reopen large swaths of the federal government.

Judea and Samaria Should Return to Their Rightful Owner By Amil Imani

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/judea_and_samaria_should_return
When we dig into history books, we can hardly find people or countries that have gone out of existence for as long as 2,000 years and then reappeared and been reborn. Thus, it is indeed accurate to say that the rebirth of Israel, this beautiful ancient culture, people, and land, is truly a miracle from God.
I believe that the time has come to unite all Israel. Historically and biblically, both Judea and Samaria undeniably have been part of the heritage of the Jewish people. They belonged to Israel 2,000 years ago, and they belong to Israel now. Arabs have absolutely no historic ties to Judea and Samaria. Historic ties are the basis of assertions to a geographic area.
Annexation of these two historical Jewish lands will stipulate a strong and well-defined standing for West Bank Arabs. Israeli equal justice under the law will apply to all people. All terrorists’ infrastructures will be eradicated. The residents of those regions will be subjected to Israeli rules and regulation and will be dealt with in the same fashion that all countries deal with domestic insurgent, treachery, and lawless organizations.
“The Jewish people didn’t wake up one day saying ‘Jews are connected to the Land of Israel.’ The whole story, the history and the destiny of the Jewish people, is geared toward the idea that we were there and we are coming back.”
Let us clarify this now and forever: historically and otherwise, there has never been a Palestinian state, nor a political body that is owned by Palestinians. According to the advancement of international agreements from 1917 until 1947, the land of Israel was renamed Palestine by the Romans in the 2nd century. It was later divided into three states: Jordan, a Jewish state, and an Arab state. While the Jews swallowed this excruciating deal, shrinking the size of their ancestral land by over 75%, the Arabs snubbed and rejected it altogether. As a result, the Arabs launched an invasion against the newly established State of Israel in 1948. Jordan managed to occupy the area of Judea and Samaria and illegitimately annexed it.

Letty’s Little Letter By Marilyn Penn

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

In today’s Times a letter to the editor appears from Letty Cotton Pogrebin regarding the accusations of anti-Semitism in the Women’s March: “Since the first Women’s March in 2017, a number of feminist intermediaries have tried to help bridge the organizers’ ideological and political gaps, with scant success. Until all of us understand that anti-racism and anti-Semitism are the same toxic madness split at the root, and until we embrace intersectionality, without defining any woman out, our struggle against sexism and racism will be hobbled by our squabbles with one another.” When I googled Letty’s name with different combinations of women’s march/anti-Semitism, only one article surfaced written in March 2017, a few months after the first march. Here’s what Letty said then: “When it comes to Israel and Palestine, I’m with Nancy Kaufman, CEO of the National Council of Jewish women, who says she’ll work with anyone except those who reject Israel’s right to exist. This winter she (Kaufman) met in advance with organizers of the Women’s March on Washington to ensure that message would be ‘pro-something, not anti-Israel.’ She received assurances that the march would focus on the issues NCJJW cares about – women’s health, reproductive justice, immigration, children and families, economic equality, voting rights, misogyny and bigotry. The Washington March did all that and more based on its core commitment to intersectionality, the belief that forms of oppression are linked and must be confronted simultaneously. Given today’s vitriolic political environment, intersectionality is not just a galvanizing theory, it’s an organizing tool. (Moment magazine, 3/6/17

Before the first march took place, co-organizer Linda Sarsour, an American woman who identifies as Palestinian and wears a hijab to proclaim that, made it clear that “no feminist could be a Zionist,” that as a woman of color, she could not invite Zionist women to march with other females because they support a colonial, oppressive regime – Israel. Co-organizer Tamika Mallory joined with Black Lives Matter to also protest the inclusion of any Zionist and both women were ardent supporters of infamous anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan as well as the BDS movement which aims to destroy Israel economically and culturally and ostracize that country from the community of nations. As for intersectionality, it notoriously excludes Jewish groups from participation, considering them among the “privileged white” as opposed to the oppressed people of color. Sarsour’s comments before the first march were made on national t.v. – not hidden in a private e-mail. At the time of the first march, no Jewish leader spoke out to caution Jewish women about supporting a movement organized with anti-Semitic intent. In New York, some religious leaders were proudly marching alongside members of their congregations whom they urged to participate. In New York, feminist Letty remained silent and subsequently endorsed the march despite all contrary evidence that anti-Semitism had been removed from its fundamental charter.

It took a year before actress Alyssa Milano, a founder of the MeToo movement, came forward and announced that she would not join the 2019 march unless the organizers repudiated their adulation of Lewis Farrakhan and their own anti-Semitic comments. That made news and suddenly other voices were heard, though it wasn’t until Dec 28th that Letty’s letter appeared, particularly odd since she had written about anti-Semitism in the women’s movement as early as June, 1982. (Ms Magazine) Letty, along with other religious, community and political leaders, needs to do more soul-searching as to why so many Jews who are outspoken about Islamophobia, racism and misogyny and other headings of the liberal agenda – waited until after the Pittsburgh massacre to focus on the clear and blatant message of Jew hatred behind the Women’s March.

Medium: The Garbage Can of the Progressive Fascist By Frank Salvato

I just read one of the most honest pieces of self-indictment ever written at Medium.com. I just read one of the scariest pieces of self-indictment at Medium.com. These two articles were one and the same and they define the complete arrogance of the Progressive movement; a movement which has now turned full-blown Fascist.

In this article, titled Intolerant Liberals by Tucker FitzGerald (love the capitalized ‘G’ in Fitzgerald, it’s so painfully hip) he professes to explain to everyone that people who identify as Conservatives are completely miss-reading Progressives. He states clearly that, “We have no interest in everyone getting treated the same. We have no interest in giving all ideas equal airtime. We have no interest in ‘tolerating’ all beliefs.”

Indeed, Mr. Fitzgerald – with a capital ‘G’ – has it right when he says Conservatives have Progressives pegged incorrectly. Progressives aren’t “progressive” at all. They are Fascists.

In speaking from his pedestal of arrogance, he posits an example of “true equality” in saying that the election of a female President of the United States would mean nothing but a drop in the bucket. In Fitzgerald’s eye (and evidently those of his Fascist brethren, as well) he believes true equality can only happen in the instance of the presidency after 45 women are elected, consecutively, to the office.

Evidently, Mr. Fitzgerald’s testicles reside in the bottom of his girlfriend’s woMan-wallet.

Edward Cline: Lone Wolves

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/12/lone-wolves.html

Canadian Columnist Mark Steyn tackles a term, “lone wolf,” which describes not so much any jihadist as it does the authorities that fossick around a box of Islamic Crackerjacks in search of a motive, in strenuous evasion of the fact that the perps were Muslims motivated by Islam .

The suspects suffer from “mental illness,” their cranial instability probably the most safest label they pin to a killer without being accused of not being “diversity’” friendly.

“This term ‘lone wolf’ is a cop-out…the idea that they somehow have to have a membership card in Islamic State or in al Qaeda for it to be official, fully-credentialed terror, like getting a hairdresser’s license in New York State is completely preposterous” he stated.

Steyn added that the rhetoric of “lone wolf” terrorists allows those who do not want to admit that radical Islam is a problem to brush off terror as isolated incidents, saying “all jihad is local. That actually suits them, to say, ‘oh no this is just some mentally ill guy in Ottawa and this is another guy who’s a bit goofy in New York and there’s no connection between the two.’ Because otherwise you have to treat it like your other big story. You have to treat it like ideological Ebola and you have to stop the infection…”

In other words, the term “lone wolf” permits authorities to hopscotch over the reality of Islam-fueled terrorism, and thus avoid the hypothetical unpleasantness of offending Muslims or their “religion,” and probably the accusation of “racism” (even though the practice of Islam is not confined to any one race; but apparently this is a difficult concept to communicate).

Atrocities Revealed by the Vatican By Alex Grobman

https://www.jewishlinknj.com/features/28717-atrocities-revealed-by-the-vatican
Part XIII

The previously inadequate reporting by the American press of the plight of European Jewry improved somewhat in 1940. On January 23, The New York Times reported that Vatican radio had denounced the atrocities committed against the Polish people. The papal radio station stated it was receiving almost daily reports from Warsaw, Cracow, Pomerania, Poznan and Silesia about the “destitution, destruction and infamy of every description.”

The report that Jews and Poles were being moved into hermetically sealed ghettos that were inadequate to sustain the millions destined to live there was especially disconcerting. The Vatican concluded this was “one more grievous affront to the moral conscience of mankind, one more contemptuous insult to the law of nations.” There could be no doubt that these accounts were accurate, because they came from unimpeachable sources.

In an editorial on the following day, the Times explained its previous reluctance to report atrocity stories: “All we have heard until now have been unofficial reports of such horrors that we chose to disbelieve them as ‘exaggerated.’” Now that the Vatican “has spoken with authority that cannot be questioned; and has confirmed the worst intimations of terror which comes out of the Polish darkness.”

What the Times did not explain is why these unofficial reports and those supplied by the JTA could not have been independently investigated all along.

In The Terrible Secret, historian Walter Laqueur explained the reluctance in Britain, the US, and even in Germany and among Jews to accept the news from Poland. Many individuals remembered the propaganda campaigns of the First World War, when each side charged the other with wanton brutality. The Germans were accused of burning down villages, cutting off breasts and tongues, making soap from dead soldiers (a myth that found its way into the press during the Second World War as well, only with Jewish bodies being used instead) and other unspeakable crimes. The press duly reported the atrocities, but at the end of the war, it became clear they had been duped; many of the stories had either been made up or were greatly exaggerated.

In Buried by The Times, Laurel Leff, a seasoned professional journalist, found that editors who were young reporters during World War I were extremely skeptical of atrocity stories. After having witnessed how each side used false reports of atrocities to advance their cause during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), this experience only reinforced their distrust of such allegations.

The Other Intersectionality: Victims of Islamism by Kenneth Levin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13456/intersectionality-islamism

Censored from today’s campuses is discussion of another, in various respects competing, intersectionality: That of the shared, intersecting, predicaments of today’s victims of Islamist aggression, including terrorism.

Hamas’s operatives have trained in Sudan and worked with Sudanese forces, including those that have been engaged in the Darfur genocide. This is the organization whose supporters are leading movers behind the campus intersectionality/boycott campaign and have become the moral arbiters of campus political correctness.

Of those killed at the Twin Towers on 9/11, 215 were black (136 men, 79 women). Other African Americans were murdered in subsequent Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks in California and Florida and elsewhere, and are as likely to be victims of future such terror attacks as anyone else. But work to prevent, and minimize the impact, of such assaults apparently counts for no more to Black Lives Matter, when weighed against promoting an anti-Israel agenda, than it does to SJP and other Hamas-linked groups.

The “intersectionality” promoted on campuses and beyond by Hamas/SJP and their fellow travelers seeks, in pursuit of its anti-Israel agenda, to distract attention from the Islamist onslaught, its ongoing savaging of populations in Africa, Asia and America.

The term “intersectionality” was coined by an African-American academic, Kimberlé Crenshaw, in 1989 to denote the circumstance of being the target of more than one bias. Crenshaw saw herself as the potential victim of both anti-black racism and misogyny, thereby living at the intersection of the two bigotries. In recent years, the term has gained prominence on many of the nation’s campuses to signify something else: the supposed shared, “intersecting,” predicaments of racial and ethnic groups — as well as women and sexual minorities — victimized by white male racism and its history of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and slavery.

While one can fully acknowledge the depredations of European imperialism and its exploitation of non-European populations, one can also debate the extent of its current impact on non-European populations, women and sexual minorities. Except that one cannot debate it: In much of Western, including American, academia today, such debate is not permitted.

Israel’s Brain-Gain; No Brain-Drain Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/2VfFw89

1.. According to Adam Reuter, Chairman of “Financial Immunities” and author of the 2018 Israel – Island of Success (Globes Business Daily, Dec. 19, 2018): Israel is not afflicted by brain-drain, but benefits from brain-gain.

While Israel’s establishment documents net-migration of higher-education Israelis, it fails to document the massive influx of higher-education Olim (Jewish immigrants). About 2/3 of the Olim – 18-years-old and older – have gone through higher education. For instance, in 2015, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported a brain-drain of 1,360 higher-education Israelis, ignoring the 14,870 higher-education Olim, who arrived in 2015, 48% of whom possessed graduate degrees and PhDs.

While the ratio of higher-education Israelis (compared to the entire population) ranks third in the world, following Japan and Canada, the ratio of higher-education Olim is significantly higher than the rest of Israel’s population. Over 25% of the Olim are experienced in the critical areas of hightech, engineering, computer science, medicine and health.

From 1980-2010, 30,000 higher-education Israelis emigrated (the total of exiting, minus returning Israelis), while 290,000 higher-education Olim arrived from the USSR, France, the USA, etc.. Considering the 25,000 higher-education Olim who emigrated, there was a net brain-gain of 235,000 from 1980-2010.

From 2010-2018, some 105,000 higher-education Olim arrived (out of a total of about 198,000 Olim), while 22,000 higher-education Israelis emigrated – a net brain-gain of 83,000; an annual net brain-grain of 9,000.

From 1980-2018, there has been a net brain-gain of 315,000 higher-education people!

Moreover, from 2010-2016, 4,000 PhD Israelis returned to Israel with enhanced experience and networking, providing tailwind to economic growth.

Yuval Noah Harari Is Worried About Our Souls The big-data makeover of humanity could be a recipe for disaster. By Steve Paulson

http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/yuval-noah-harari-is-worried-about-our-souls

Just a few years ago Yuval Noah Harari was an obscure Israeli historian with a knack for playing with big ideas. Then he wrote Sapiens, a sweeping, cross-disciplinary account of human history that landed on the bestseller list and remains there four years later. Like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Sapiens proposed a dazzling historical synthesis, and Harari’s own quirky pronouncements—“modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history”— made for compulsive reading. The book also won him a slew of high-profile admirers, including Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg.

In his new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari offers a grab bag of prognostications on everything from new technology to politics and religion. Although he’s become a darling of Silicon Valley, Harari is openly critical of how Facebook and other tech companies exploit our personal data, and he worries that online interactions are replacing actual face-to-face encounters. Much of the book speculates on the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence. If computer algorithms can know you better than you know yourself, is there any room left for free will? And where does that leave our politics?

Harari is a rapid-fire conversationalist who seems to have an opinion about everything. He’s remarkably self-assured and clearly enjoys the role of provocateur. We began by agreeing that something feels very different about this moment in history. We are on the precipice of a revolution that will change humanity for either our everlasting benefit or destruction—it’s not clear which. “For the first time in history,” Harari said, “we have absolutely no idea how the world will look in 30 years.”
HOMO MACHINA: We are no longer afraid of the machine, Harari says, we have become it: “We no longer search for information. We Google. We trust the Google algorithm and we lose the ability to search for information independently.”Daniel Naber / Wikimedia

What’s different about this moment in history?

What’s different is the pace of technological change, especially the twin revolutions of artificial intelligence and bioengineering. They make it possible to hack human beings and other organisms, and then re-engineer them and create new life forms.