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Ruth King

Joe Biden’s four-D speech By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/joe-bidens-four-d-speech/

 In the fall 2004 issue of the Jewish Political Studies Review, published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Natan Sharanksy outlined what he called the “new anti-Semitism”—a resurgence in democratic countries of Jew-hatred aimed at the State of Israel.

In his piece, the author of Fear No Evil and The Case for Democracy presented a “three-D” test (demonization, double standards and delegitimization) that he had devised to distinguish this worrisome phenomenon from acceptable criticism of Israeli policies.

Little did he know at the time that, nearly two decades later, the word “new” could be removed from the description. Indeed, the dastardly triplet not only continues to be applied to the Jewish state by its sworn enemies, but has become mainstream even in the halls of power in Washington.

Rather than being eradicated through exposure, however, the three-D vilification technique has proven so effective that the left began to adapt it to discredit any figure or movement that doesn’t toe its line. The practice is especially blatant during political campaigns, such as the one being conducted in Israel ahead of the Nov. 1 Knesset elections and those surrounding the midterms in the U.S. Congress.

Here, a fourth “D” can be added to the arsenal: disingenuousness. As is the case with the “new-old” anti-Semites who pretend only to be targeting certain policies, the above detractors claim merely to be protesting against a particular politician. In Israel, it’s opposition leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the U.S., it’s former President Donald Trump. That the supporters of each, who constitute half of their countries’ populations, are also treated to hefty doses of the first three Ds is where the last comes in.

Nothing better illustrates this demonization, imposing of double standards, delegitimization and disingenuousness than U.S. President Joe Biden’s prime-time speech to the nation on Thursday in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.

The Origins of Woke A forgotten satirical book from the nineties predicted cancel culture. Phoebe Maltz Bovy

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-origins-of-woke?utm_source=email

At a church book sale in my Toronto neighborhood, I found The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook, a bestseller by Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf first published 30 years ago. I always gravitate to books like this—first to see whether there is anything new in this world, and then to remind myself that the overly simplistic answer is no. (See also the 1995 compendium Debating Sexual Correctness. The #MeToo discourse existed prior to #MeToo.) It seems we’re living through a kind of 1990s revival—fueled, I suspect, by nostalgia for pre-Covid, pre-9/11, pre-internet times. Or maybe just by teenagers’ timeless desire to dress the way everyone did decades ago.

The front cover of the dictionary shows a man, a woman, and a dog, each affixed with labels such as “hair disadvantaged” (he’s balding), “woman of noncolor” (she’s white), and “nonhuman animal companion” (it’s a shaggy dog). None of them, though especially the woman and the dog, would be out of place in a 2022 farmers market. (Again: cyclical fashions.)

The back cover bears a warning: “Be sensitive or else!,” with the follow-up, “Welcome to the nineties. But you better watch what you say. If you’re not politically correct, not even your pet—oops, your animal companion­—will love you anymore.” Beard’s author bio begins, “Although Henry Beard is a typical product of elitist educational institutions and a beneficiary of a number of negative action programs, he has struggled to overcome his many severe privileges.” And Cerf’s: “Christopher Cerf is a melanin-impoverished, temporarily abled, straight, half-Anglo-, half-Jewish-American male.” Privilege disclaimers in the early 1990s! I had to have it.   

Macron’s Pessimistic Moment by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18853/macron-pessimistic-moment

“Prepare for the end of abundance!” This is the message that French President Emmanuel Macron offered in his first post-holiday pronouncement last month. Though supposedly addressed at the French people, Macron’s lamentation seemed to have the entire “Western world” in mind.

In its current version, the nomos [organizing principle] trying to seize control in almost all Western societies could be described as “victimism”.

In victimism the state is seen as a cash machine distributing money among the victims, while apologizing to them. In the past few years. Western states, both in Europe and North America, have distributed countless trillions…

Some philosophers, among them the German Jürgen Habermas, have tried to give victimism a Christian varnish. In their reading, the Western world, long after having adopted “secularism”, remembers Christianity as a school of frugality, empathy for the downtrodden and atonement of sins symbolized by Christ as the ultimate victim.

The trouble with that reading is that it is closer to the Greek concept of the scapegoat, than to the Christian concept of redeemer.

“Prepare for the end of abundance!” This is the message that French President Emmanuel Macron offered in his first post-holiday pronouncement last month. Though supposedly addressed at the French people, Macron’s lamentation seemed to have the entire “Western world” in mind.

According to him the era of easily available capital and seemingly endless natural resources, notably oil and natural gas, is already over. The “Western world” must learn to live in a different way.

‘There We Will Strike Them’: The Munich Massacre and Its Aftermath by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18859/1972-munich-massacre

Prime Minister Golda Meir — who had been a signatory to Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 — refused to bargain with [the terrorists], branding it blackmail. She later said: “We have learnt the bitter lesson. One may save a life immediately only to endanger more lives. Terrorism has to be wiped out.”

Meanwhile Berlin offered safe passage and unlimited cash to the terrorists….

Libyan president Muammar Gadaffi had funded the attack at the behest of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, who subsequently denied any involvement and two years later was feted in a standing ovation at the United Nations General Assembly.

“We were not engaged in vengeance. What we did was to concretely prevent in the future. We acted against those who thought that they would continue to perpetrate acts of terror”. — Mossad Chief Zvi Zamir, in an interview with Yossi Melman, (17 February 2006), Haaretz.

Too often Western nations, despite earlier rejection, condemnation and sometimes hostility, have eventually been obliged to follow the lead Israel was first forced to take to protect its people. American and European responses to jihadist attacks on their own territory, especially after 9/11, is an example of that. We are at present living through another example: the Iranian nuclear threat. Israeli leaders have repeatedly warned that Tehran’s nuclear programme not only represents grave danger to their own country but to the entire region and to the world. As in its response to Munich, Israel is conducting a covert campaign to stop it, including by targeted assassinations. Meanwhile the US and European countries are appeasing the mullahs in Tehran, just as they did with Palestinian terrorists in the 1970s, and are on the verge of striking a deal that will pave the path to an Iranian nuclear capability. This time, ignoring Israeli warnings will have even more dire and far-reaching consequences.

In memory of: David Berger, Anton Fliegerbauer, Ze’ev Friedman, Yosef Gutfreund, Eliezer Halfin, Yosef Romano, Amitzur Shapira, Kehat Shorr, Mark Slavin, Andre Spitzer, Yakov Springer, Moshe Weinberg.

Fifty years ago this week, 5th and 6th September 1972, the world watched in horror as Jews were again brutally murdered on German soil, at the Olympics in Munich. Eight Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorists, using the cover name “Black September,” tortured and murdered 11 Israeli athletes, emasculating one of them as he lay dying in front of his team-mates. They stormed the athletes’ accommodation, killed two immediately and held the remainder hostage, demanding the release of 234 terrorist prisoners held by Israel. Prime Minister Golda Meir — who had been a signatory to Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 — refused to bargain with them, branding it blackmail. She later said: “We have learnt the bitter lesson. One may save a life immediately only to endanger more lives. Terrorism has to be wiped out.”

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

As Michael Ordman writes, “Israel is the country that is constantly striving to create a better future for us all”- from Albania to Zambia and in every continent and nation in between lives are ameliorated by Israel’s contributions to science and medicine and technology. That does not deter the turpitude in the United Nations, in academia, the media and among the vicious boycott and divest movements.

However, Israel thrives and succeeds as a democracy and locus of an unbroken chain of Jewish faith, survival and future.

B.D.S. really defines Israel’s religious legacy: Bible, Devotion, Survival. Rsk

The Biden Administration’s Nuclear Deal Is the Biggest Gift to the World’s ‘Top State Sponsor of Terrorism’ by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18852/biden-administration-iran-nuclear-deal

The main beneficiaries of the increased revenues will most likely be the office of Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and more importantly the IRGC’s elite branch the Quds Force, which carries out extraterritorial operations to advance the revolutionary principles of the Islamic Republic abroad.

A considerable part of the economy and Iran’s financial systems are owned and controlled by the IRGC and the Office of the Supreme Leader…. This economic haven means that state and non-state actors, such as the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Shiite militias in Iraq and Bashar Assad’s Syria, will be the next major beneficiaries of Biden’s sanctions relief and new nuclear deal.

The Biden administration will more likely contribute to more tensions between Iran and other countries in the region, and lead to further regional insecurity, destabilization, humanitarian tragedies, and most likely a major war.

Biden’s new nuclear deal is the biggest gift that one could give to the world’s “top state sponsor of terrorism”: unlimited nuclear weapons, no inspections past present or future, the missiles to deliver them, enriched uranium to be held by Russia and returned to Iran or wherever they both decide, “$100 billion per year to spread terror around the globe” — in short, assured expansion of the “Revolution” not only throughout the Middle East but further, straight into America’s soft underbelly, Venezuela.

The Biden administration’s new nuclear deal with the ruling clerics will lift economic sanctions against the Iranian regime the moment the deal enters into effect.

At that moment, the Iranian regime will receive approximately $90 billion. The Biden administration will also instantly be lifting sanctions on the Iranian regime’s energy sector, which will also significantly boost the regime’s oil and gas revenues.

Biden’s infantile, self-aggrandizing ‘democracy’ speech Oliver Wiseman

https://spectatorworld.com/newsletter/bidens-infantile-self-aggrandizing-democracy-speech/?utm_source=

“Even if you buy Biden’s infantile, self-aggrandizing Harry-versus-Voldemort account of the current moment, the president offers you no solutions other than “vote for me.” Which, of course, was the whole point of the speech.”

Democracy for dummies 

Allow me to indulge in a quick thought experiment. Let’s assume that Biden is exactly right when he says, as he did in his primetime address last night, that the extremism of “MAGA Republicans… threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

In this experiment, the dark diagnosis is the truth and Biden knows it to be the truth. What should a responsible president do under such circumstances? The answer, as my colleague Matt Purple put it in his must-read reaction to the speech, is to seek to vanquish election denialism and ugly conspiracy theories by “working to bring [Trump supporters] back into the national fold” rather than “treating them like the enemy — which will drive them deeper into the MAGA maw.”

Look at what Biden has done in office and you will struggle to find instances of such action. Examples of exactly what a responsible president should not do, however, are easier to come by. To list a few, briefly: recommend the effective abolition of the filibuster; vilify Supreme Court judges; look on as your party spends tens of millions of dollars boosting the most extreme voices in Republican midterms; slander anyone who refuses to support your voting legislation as no better than a segregationist; describe modest changes to the rules that govern elections as “Jim Crow on steroids”; indulge in economic policymaking by executive edict in a way that you know is unconstitutional.

Marines Are Not Props for Biden Fascist Theatrics Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/09/marines-are-not-props-biden-fascist-theatrics-daniel-greenfield/

Biden’s people decided to stage his campaign speech denouncing half the country with a sense of crisis with red lighting against dark shadows and had two Marines standing in the shadows against a brick wall. There was a real sense of crisis in making Biden look like the villain in a movie about a fascist dystopia, but not the one they wanted.

The Biden regime claimed that having them there was about showing the “deep and abiding respect the president has for these service members.”

Showing them respect would mean handing out medals or delivering a speech praising them. Not using them as props in his fascist theatrics.

And even Democrats and the media are questioning using Marines as props.

An Iraq War veteran and former Democratic Party official on Friday criticized the presence of US Marines in the backdrop of President Joe Biden’s speech in Philadelphia, during which he issued stinging political criticism of Republicans.

“We need to make sure that our military is as removed from politics as possible and it’s not right if a Democrat uses the military as a political pawn and it’s not right if the Republican Party does it as well. None of our politicians or elected leaders should do that,” Allison Jaslow, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told CNN’s Brianna Keilar on “New Day.”

The Biden Regime Collapses the ‘Public’-‘Private’ Distinction Merging the state and the corporate sphere into one disfigured blob, historically speaking, is a hallmark of actual fascism.  By Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/02/the-biden-regime-collapses-the-public-private-distinction/

On Thursday, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is also the Show Me State’s candidate for U.S. Senate this November, unveiled some very interesting documents that his office, along with the office of Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, have received since the two states jointly filed a potentially pathbreaking lawsuit in May. Their lawsuit alleges that various high-ranking Biden administration officials have been colluding, in censorious fashion, with the purportedly “private” oligarchs of Big Tech. The straightforward aim of this collusion is the suppression of the dissident “wrongthink”—viz., conservative speech—that threatens the Biden regime’s tenuous grasp on power.

The documents Schmitt and Landry have received, pursuant to their serving of discovery requests and issuing of third-party subpoenas, shine a spotlight on the depths to which the Biden regime has fallen to collapse any putative distinction between the “public” sector and the “private” sector. Their findings thus far in this still-pending litigation reveal to all, as if we needed more evidence but a week after Mark Zuckerberg’s podcast confession heard ’round the world with popular host Joe Rogan, the extent to which Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter no longer qualify as meaningfully “private” and have instead simply become appendages of the state.

According to Schmitt, the Biden Department of Justice has, since Missouri and Louisiana’s lawsuit was filed, identified 45 federal officials who have “interacted with social media companies on misinformation.” What’s more, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) pinpointed 32 additional Biden functionaries with whom it communicated, and YouTube (a Google product) identified 11 such flunkies with whom it communicated.

Medical Breakthrough By Chris Pope

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/09/12/medical-breakthrough/

Making conservative health reform popular

For a generation of Republican political candidates, Obamacare was a gift that kept on giving. The Democrats’ enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 gave the GOP historic gains in that year’s midterms; its bungled implementation handed them the Senate in 2014; and soaring premiums helped Donald Trump capture the White House in 2016.

But the Trump administration fell well short of its promises to replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” and many Republicans have become wary of entering a complex policy minefield. This aversion has had electoral consequences: Voters who cited health care as their most important issue cast their ballots three to one for Biden over Trump in November 2020 — accounting for much of the swing from 2016.

Any Republican hoping to win the White House in 2024 cannot simply run against Obamacare, but must have a health-care agenda that is compelling to voters — and, once in office, will need the ability to deliver on it.

With a combination of $1.2 trillion per year in private insurance and $1.9 trillion per year of public spending on health care, Americans enjoy the best access to cutting-edge medical care in the world — without comprehensive rationing of drugs, physician services, or hospital procedures. Yet America’s great willingness to pay for access to ever-improving medical capabilities has led it to neglect keeping costs under control. In November 2021, while 82 percent of Americans rated the quality of the health care they received “excellent” or “good” (only 3 percent judged it “poor”), 77 percent were dissatisfied with the nation’s health-care costs.