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Ruth King

Israeli High-Tech Foils Hamas and Islamic Jihad Terror Schemes Hezbollah should take note. Ari Lieberman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/israeli-high-tech-foils-hamas-and-islamic-jihad-ari-lieberman/

Israel’s successful conclusion of Operation Breaking Dawn capped several achievements for the Israel Defense Forces that highlighted its technical prowess and vaunted intelligence capabilities. The clash also underscored the extent to which terror entities in Gaza have lost political capital in the two years since the signing of the Abraham Accords. During the conflict, the IDF excelled both offensively and defensively and Israel’s nemesis to the north, Hezbollah, has taken notice. The Iranian proxy militia has engaged in some saber rattling recently but it is keenly aware of Israel’s military capabilities and its own military and political limitations.

When it was first deployed just over a decade ago, Israel’s Iron Dome rocket defense system maintained a success rate of between 75 to 78 percent. Continuous software and hardware improvements to Iron Dome have made the system 97 percent effective.

According to information released by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, in 66 hours between August 5, and August 7, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired some 1,175 rockets at Israel and 990 of these landed in Israeli territory. Iron Dome intercepted 450 rockets. The remaining rockets landed in open areas. Iron Dome is programmed to launch only if the system determines that the rocket’s flight path poses a danger to civilians or critical infrastructure, thus increasing its efficiency and cost effectiveness.

Racism to Achieve Diversity Harms All Americans For everyone’s sake, Americans of all ethnicities must unite to reject racism of all kinds and embrace becoming a colorblind meritocracy. By Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/23/racism-to-achieve-diversity-harms-all-americans/

If you’ve navigated the thicket of microinstructions, hectoring, guilt-tripping, institutionalized resentment, establishment-generated misinformation, double standards, and bizarre new terminology, then welcome to the world of woke antiracism in America today.

One of the biggest absurdities spread by the woke antiracists is that white people must practice “allyship” and refrain from sharing their opinions on race relations with “people of color.” There is nothing wrong with listening as well as talking, but for white people to remain silent in the face of one of the most destructive movements in American history is negligent and cowardly.

As it is, progressive elites in America, almost all of them white, are indoctrinating nonwhites in America to believe that they live in an oppressive, racist nation. They are falsely told that unjustified police violence disproportionately targets blacks. They are falsely told the biggest threat to the nation is white supremacists. Worse still, they are told that every disparity in achievement between races is a product of white racism, and that white racists are to blame for any failures in their individual lives or within their communities.

The motivation for this indoctrination is political and economic. America’s corporate socialist uniparty—all of the Democrats and a sizable percentage of Republicans—finds power and profit in selling this narrative. It justifies expanding government, nurturing dependency, unchecked immigration, and building the welfare and diversity bureaucracies. It creates a divided and fractious electorate that is incapable of recognizing this political betrayal and unifying to stop it.

The fruits of woke indoctrination are that an overwhelming majority of blacks, Latinos, and Asians vote for “progressive” politicians. In the 2020 election, Biden was supported by 87 percent of black voters, by 61 percent of Latinos, and by 63 percent of Asians. These partisan margins have become the decisive swing vote that is changing the destiny of America. Which is to say, America used to be a country where property rights and free speech were paramount values, but today it is being converted into a corporate socialist dystopia where there are only oligarchs and serfs dependent on government handouts. And as this epic, life-changing transformation occurs, white people are told to just shut up and be “allies.”

There are plenty of brilliant conservative black intellectuals who are doing a good job of exposing how the fraudulent, destructive essence of woke ideology harms everyone regardless of their ethnicity: Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Carol Swain, and other well-established luminaries, along with thousands of younger entrants such as Candace Owens and Brandon Tatum. The emergence of black conservatives, too numerous to mention, is an encouraging pushback against the woke minions and their corporate backers. Others, such as Indian-Americans Vivek Ramaswamy and Dinesh D’Souza, have also become important conservative thinkers.

So with their help, it’s time to mainstream a position that is unfairly depicted by the “woke” as something only a “far-right extremist can think”—namely, that for several decades America has been a systemically racist nation against white people, and has more recently begun to also discriminate against Asians, especially in college and university admissions. This is harming everyone, including the nonwhites it is alleged to help.

Through the lens of wokeness, Yale moves to abolish proven diagnostics tests By Olivia Murray

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/through_the_lens_of_wokeness_yale_moves_to_abolish_proven_diagnostics_tests.html

Angela Davis is a professed communist, with a focus on militant Black activism, who coined the phrase, “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.” This catchy but superficial slogan has been embraced throughout nearly every American institution, most notably academia. Unsurprisingly given Davis’ admitted political beliefs, the mantra is quintessential Marxist language. In the first four words, Davis discloses there is a deep-rooted and egregiously immoral societal issue (racism), so naturally this requires resolution, which of course could only be done through a radical cultural revolution. Then, we see the lure of a “social justice” cause, with its promise that participation will make the participant morally superior.

And now, Yale University’s Chief Clinical Officer, Thomas J. Balcezak, finally caved, allowing emotional wokism to permeate a discipline that ought to be beyond reproach —  the Marxian dogma articulated by Davis has completely supplanted documented medical experiences and observable data.

So what is going on? Well, here is the “short version” according to physicians at Do No Harm, “Yale is ditching a clinically proven kidney diagnostic tool on the grounds that it’s racist.”

Now, the oldest physical copy of a dictionary I happen to have on hand on the moment is a children’s dictionary from the year 2000, and it offers two definitions for racism:

Belief that certain races of people are by birth and nature superior to others
Discrimination or hatred based on race

Worth noting, is that the context of both of these definitions requires a thinking mind — inanimate objects cannot hold beliefs or hatreds, nor do they partake in biases. So how can a diagnostic test possibly be racist?

The Morning Briefing: The Delicious Stupidity of Liz Cheney’s Presidential Folly By Stephen Kruiser

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/08/24/the-morning-briefing-the-delicious-stupidity-of-liz-cheneys-presidential-folly-n1623691

It has been just over a week since the Republican voters of Wyoming let Liz Cheney know what they thought of her stabbing them in the back by joining the Democrats’ J6 House Soviet Select Committee on Daddy Issues.

The mental unwellness that Dick’s daughter began exhibiting that night hasn’t improved. Soon-to-be-former-Congresswoman Cheney is still harboring delusions about the viability of a presidential run in 2024. So much so, in fact, that she’s lining up some Koch money and some experienced Republican consultant firepower to help her, per Rick’s reporting.

I cannot begin to describe how much I would like to see her go through with this. I may have to rent a storage space for the extra schadenfreude I’ll have when this ego train wrecks.

Here is a snippet from a VIP column I wrote last week:

There is no great GOP silent majority just waiting for a milquetoast squish alternative to Trump. It’s absolutely ridiculous to think that if faced with AOC, Mayor Pete, or Kamala Harris on the ballot, millions of Republicans are going to think, “Hmmm… better that than mean tweets.”

We should also remember that the disgruntled GOPers who would get behind a Cheney run are the same ones who were behind the Great Evan McMullin Gambit of 2016.

In short, Cheney’s merry band of potential voters is made up of a handful of morally bankrupt Never Trump grifters and maybe one drunk Democrat named Chet.

A Dying, Desperate Establishment Is a Dangerous Beast : David P. Goldman

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2022/08/23/a-dying-desperate-establishment-is-a-dangerous-beast-n1623454

The best piece of U.S. political analysis published in recent weeks is Michael Anton’s essay at Compact Magazine, “They Can’t Let Him Back In.” Writes Anton, a former deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration: “Our rulers’ wealth and power rise with open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. Trump, at least in principle, and often in practice, threatens all three.” The brazenly partisan perversion of the justice system that was the Mar-a-Lago raid validates Anton’s warning in spades.

Trump threatens what the elites call the “rules-based international order,” which simply means an international order in which the elites make the rules.

Our elites are as incompetent as they are malicious. If anyone bears the blame for tearing down the post-war international order—the NATO alliance and the dollar-centered monetary system—it is the elites themselves, whose arrogance, overreach, and outright pigheadedness threaten to ruin the West. Long before the next U.S. president takes office in January 2025, the “rules-based” order and the institutions attached to it will be in ruins. The elites will be desperate.

The Ukraine war is a dealbreaker for the “rules-based order.” Despite the drumbeat of propaganda channeled through the echo chamber of international media, Russia is NOT losing—not militarily and not economically. China has doubled its imports of Russian oil and India has quadrupled its imports. The two countries alone pay Putin $150 billion a year.

Prager U Video: Is Israel An Apartheid State? A South African sets the record straight.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/prager-u-video-israel-apartheid-state-prager-u/

Does Israel discriminate against Arabs? Is it today’s version of apartheid South Africa? Olga Meshoe, herself a South African whose family experienced apartheid, settles the question once and for all.

Don’t miss this must-watch short video below:

In Sweden, a Big Step Forward for Islam With the Nuance Party, European Muslims go to the next level. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/sweden-big-step-forward-islam-bruce-bawer/

Increasingly, the modern history of Sweden reads like something concocted by a stand-up comedian with a taste for black humor. Take, for example, the official claim that Sweden has “the first feminist government in the world,” complete with a distinctly “feminist foreign policy.” Yeah, it’s so feminist, as I noted in February 2019, that when a gaggle of Swedish diplomats traveled to Iran, the women all wore headscarves and refrained from shaking hands with their bearded hosts. Moreover, although violent Muslim immigrants are making more and more neighborhoods so dangerous that, as I quoted one woman saying in 2017, people “sleep with a hammer beside the bed,” Muslim immigration levels remain high, and while retired Swedes who spent their adult lives voting for this madness are, as I wrote last year, “warehoused in old shipping containers” – which sounds like a sick joke, but isn’t – new Muslim arrivals “get townhouses.”

Last March some Ukrainian women and children were staying at a refugee hostel in Örebro when, at about 3 A.M., a gang of male Somali immigrants broke in, obviously up to no good. Thankfully, as I reported at the time, the Ukrainians were able to save themselves by running to their rooms and locking the doors, but some were so shaken that they wished they’d never left home. Why trade one war zone for another? And in May I wrote about the “Koran riots” – mass outbreaks of Muslim violence in several Swedish cities (car burnings, Molotov cocktails, etc.), all of it in furious response to thoroughly peacefully protests against, well, Muslim violence. 

Now comes the latest chapter in this bleakly comic tale. On September 11, Sweden will hold parliamentary elections. This will represent the first national test for the Nuance Party (Partiet Nyans), which a fellow named Mikail Yüksel founded three years ago after being expelled from the Center Party for belonging to the Gray Wolves, a gang of Turkish neo-fascist jihadist types. Targeting Muslim voters, the Nuance Party has grown quickly – and why not? Where else will you find candidates who want to introduce harsh measures to fight Islamophobia, to anonymize housing applicants (so you can end up renting the spare room next to your daughter’s bedroom to one of those would-be Somali rapists mentioned above), to make the European Union less of a “Christian club” by admitting Turkey and Bosnia, to increase pressure on EU countries (such as Hungary) to take Muslim refugees, to compel proportional representation of ethnic groups in the police departments and counterterrorism services, to introduce blasphemy laws and limit free speech, to forbid the removal of Muslim children from their homes by child-protective services (which often remove them, mind you, because they’re being raped by members of their extended families), to build more mosques, to permit Muslim apparel absolutely everywhere, and to ban Koran burning and offensive commentary about Islam.

Salman Rushdie and the West’s Jihad Denial Khomeini’s fatwa didn’t just mark Rushdie for assassination. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/salman-rushdie-and-wests-jihad-denial-bruce-thornton/

Recently an Iran-inspired jihadist attempted to murder author Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed ten times and remains in critical condition. The origins of this crime go back to 1989, when the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa that promised millions of dollars (eventually $3.3 million), instant martyrdom, and a trip to paradise for anyone killed while murdering the apostate Rushdie, who allegedly insulted Islam in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

The subsequent response of the West to this grotesque violation of free speech exemplified the willful blindness to jihad that would characterize the Nineties and continue even after the spectacular carnage of the 9/11attacks. Given the persistence of the EU and the Biden administration in offering appeasing concessions to Iran in their desperate attempt to restart the failed nuclear deal, our foreign policy establishment is still blind to the reality of the West’s oldest enemy.

Khomeini’s fatwa didn’t just mark Rushdie for assassination, but included the publishers of the novel and bookstores selling it: all “are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr.”

Iran’s current leader, Ali Khamenei, in 2017 confirmed the fatwa: “The decree is as Imam Khomeini issued.”

The faithful responded to the fatwa’s call, initiating a series of deadly attacks across the globe. The same year as the fatwa, 12 people died in Mumbai, and 6 Pakistanis in riots over the book. The translator of the novel in Japan was murdered, and the Italian translator stabbed. The Turkish translator survived an arson attack on a hotel that killed 37 others, and the Norwegian publisher was shot and critically injured.

Racial Discrimination and Harvard’s Invidious Boxes Not only preferences but the categories that colleges use are unconstitutional.By William McGurn

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-invidious-racial-boxes-supreme-court-unc-affirmative-action-discrimination-oconnor-hispanic-asian-label-admissions-11661196819?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

Remember the liberal outrage over Sen. Jesse Helms’s “Hands” ad in his 1990 Senate campaign against Harvey Gantt? Some credit the ad for Helms’s come-from-behind victory.

The 30-second spot featured the white hands of a frustrated job applicant crumpling a rejection letter. “You needed that job,” the narrator says, “and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?”

The ad said Mr. Gantt, who is African-American, favored racial quotas. It was politics at its rawest, and Mr. Gantt accused Helms of trying “to divide people along the lines of race.” He denied he favored quotas.

Cut to 2022. The Minneapolis Public Schools have negotiated a contract with the teachers union that includes this language: “If excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the District shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population.” In plain English, Deroy Murdock writes in the Daily Mail, it means “fire Whitey first.”

The Minneapolis contract is ugly stuff, but highly apposite as the Supreme Court prepares to hear lawsuits in October by Students for Fair Admissions accusing Harvard and the University of North Carolina of racial discrimination in admissions. In 1990, Helms’s ad was denounced as false and incendiary. These days the discrimination it highlighted is fast becoming standard practice, and not only in Minneapolis and at UNC or Harvard.

Election-Year Censorship

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/24/election-year-censorship/

Social media companies were part of what Time magazine called “​​an extraordinary shadow effort” whose objective was to prevent Donald Trump from being reelected in 2020. Two years later, and surely emboldened by their success, they are back, their sights set on throwing the midterm elections to the Democrats.

There can be no doubt that social media is aligned with the left in a political cleansing of Republican candidates and voters. According to the Time article, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”

Of course “disinformation” and “viral smears” were anything that hurt Democrats and helped Republicans. Truth was never a consideration.

And neither is it today.

“Two of the leading platforms responsible for censoring the bombshell New York Post Hunter Biden scandal stories before the 2020 presidential election are gearing up to censor free speech to combat so-called ‘misinformation’ ahead of the 2022 midterm elections,” the Media Research Center reported last week.

According to the MRC account, Facebook’s parent company Meta, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter have “pledged to target ‘misleading narratives’ by suppressing election content they deem to be false, misleading, or dangerous.” 

Meta has publicly acknowledged that it’s fielding a “dedicated team focused on the 2022 midterms to help combat election and voter interference,” and even indicated, says the MRC, “that government may even collude with the platform in censoring content.”