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Ruth King

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Have Negotiations? Shoshana Bryen

By on June 16th, 2022

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/authors/shoshana-bryen/

In December, the Biden administration quietly proposed a five-government summit to enhance prospects for the “two-state solution” it promotes as key to Middle East regional security. Israel, Jordan, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and the United States would meet to discuss, discuss … discuss … what?

Israel apparently waited several months to see if something useful would materialize but has now said it will not participate. No surprise. Negotiations work best; in fact, they work only when the parties have a common endgame. Hashing out the mechanisms, concessions, policies, gains and losses is the way to get to an agreed-upon future. These five governments have no common view.

Israel sees the future in the Abraham Accords. Egypt, and even Jordan, recognize that Accords countries (plus, Saudi Arabia and a few others that are close but not yet there) have a plan that includes economic, social, political and security gains for all the parties. Most recently:

A free-trade agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates;
An Israeli orchestra played in Egypt;
MoUs by an Israeli tech delegation in Morocco;
The renovation of a Moroccan Jewish cemetery;
Israel’s Independence Day being marked (as a holiday!) in Bahrain and Morocco;
A security agreement and air overflight rights between Saudi Arabia and Israel;
Israel’s participation in CENTCOM plans and exercises to secure the Red Sea.

War among them is a relic of the past.

The Palestinian leadership, however, insists that the past is not only the past, but also the present and the future. Oddly, President Joe Biden and the U.S. State Department are doing nothing to disabuse them of the notion.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Desperate Biden Goes Begging to Saudi Arabia

By on June 16th, 2022

https://www.nysun.com/article/desperate-biden-goes-begging-to-saudi-arabia

How humiliating. In mid-July, President Biden will travel to Saudi Arabia to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is that nation’s de facto ruler. That’s the same Mr. Biden who, on the campaign trail in 2020, called the oil superpower a “pariah” state and vowed to make sure “America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.” 

Unless, apparently, polling suggests he really, really needs the oil. Such are the complications that arise when the president of the United States departs from decades-long relationships rooted in realpolitik and follows a childish urge to abandon every policy of his predecessor, even those that were unquestionably successful.

The lead-up to this planned sit-down has been an embarrassment. In March, MBS, as he is known, and his UAE counterpart, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, refused to take a phone call from Mr. Biden. 

Imagine, the President of the United States sitting by the phone like a pimply teenager pining for that someone special to ring up. (The White House denied this report in the Wall Street Journal, saying that indeed Mr. Biden had spoken by phone with the “king”; that is called a non-denial denial.) 

Why would the UAE and Saudi rulers make Mr. Biden beg? Because the President has gone out of his way since his first week in the Oval Office to insult those two countries and let them know that agreements established under President Trump are null and void. 

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Slow Joe goes to Israel By Barry Shaw

By on June 15th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/06/slow_joe_goes_to_israel.html

The dates have been fixed for Biden’s visit to the Middle East: July 13-16, and the schedule looks loaded with pitfalls for the fumbling president.

His visit to Israel coincides with the Opening Ceremony of the Maccabiah Games which is always covered live on Israeli TV. For many Israelis, who have low expectations, Biden’s visit will be a distraction. What can he deliver for Israel?

The only four items that Biden has been fixated on for 50 years are:

Stopping Jews living in Judea and Samaria,
Dividing Jerusalem our capital,
Pushing for a “two-state” non-solution, even if the other state will inevitably be controlled by Hamas,
Increasing U.S. taxpayer money to the unrepentant regressive corrupt Palestinian Authority. Biden ignores two U.S. laws banning such payments until the PA commits not to use the money to reward their terrorist killers.

We call it their “Pay to Slay” reward system. The more Jews you kill, the more money you get, courtesy of the funding from the United States, Europe, and the UN.

This obscenity has to stop, but under Biden the payments are increased.

After telling Israel he has our backs, he will meet Mahmoud Abbas, probably in Bethlehem, to tell him he has Biden’s full support and money, no strings attached.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Jan 6 committee flouts the rules of Congress, delivers propaganda By David Zukerman

By on June 15th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/06/jan_6_committee_flouts_the_rules_of_congress_delivers_propaganda.html

The Jan. 6 House Select Committee has been marred by officials acting in an arbitrary and capricious manner. The journalistic result is propaganda not fairly and honestly informing the American people on the conduct of this committee and its threat to democratic government

For example,

“[I]t is well established that, when a congressional committee seeks to use the implied authority to compel testimony, it must respect the Separation of Powers; it must do so only in pursuit of a valid legislative purpose (and not for the purpose of generating publicity or pursuing law enforcement) and it must follow the rules associated with the delegation on which its claimed subpoena authority relies.” 

This quote appears at page 4 of the Introduction to the reply brief (Case 1:21-cv-03217-CJN Document 38 Filed 06/06/22) filed by former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in his lawsuit against Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Jan. 6 committee.

The Meadows reply brief opened the Introduction with this statement:

“No authoritative appellate court has ever held that a senior aide to a President, or a President himself, can be compelled by Congress to appear and give testimony, let alone when there is a claim of Executive Privilege.” 

This statement makes clear how breathtaking Speaker Pelosi’s actions have proven to be, willing to dash to pieces the Separation of Powers tradition of our tripartite federal government. 

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s New Policy Funds China’s Military, Supports Slavery, Achieves Nothing by Peter Schweizer

By on June 15th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18616/biden-china-policy-support

Previously, U.S. policy was that Americans were forbidden to invest in companies included in a “blacklist” of Chinese companies directly involved in China’s military, and in producing applications used by the Communist regime to oppress its own people and threaten its neighbors. The new “answers” amount to a wholesale abandonment of a policy Americans of all political stripes supported.

[I]t can also be seen as part of a long easing of economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, without obtaining any benefit for American prestige or negotiating leverage with China in return.

The 48 companies included on the initial Trump administration blacklist all work directly with the People’s Liberation Army, Chinese intelligence, or otherwise provide artificial-intelligence products and services used by Beijing to deny the human rights of its Uighur minority.

While Hikvision and Sinochem’s listed subsidiaries are not traded on major U.S. exchanges, they have been included in index funds carried by such giants as Vanguard and BlackRock.

There is no penalty for investors who continue to hold these stocks after the grace period, which ended in June 2022. All the order says is they may not buy any more shares, nor can they (after the grace period) sell what they have, without OFAC approval.

[M]oves like this should be offered only in negotiation with the Chinese over things important to American national security, and the peace and freedom of our allies. Giving up on it because it was “confusing” to international financial institutions is a sad excuse.

And it comes at a time when the Biden administration has also announced a tariff waiver on solar panels coming from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. This action, explained as a “bridge” while domestic solar panel manufacturing ramps up, re-opens a previously closed door to China’s dumping solar panels into the U.S. market.

At the same time, China is these days more belligerent, more aggressive, and more of a problem than ever. What exactly is the Biden administration getting for its quiet retreat from the tougher trade policies of the Trump administration?

Not a more conciliatory stance on Taiwan. China will “definitely not hesitate to start a war” over a Taiwan split, Chinese Defense Minister General Wei Fenghe warned the U.S recently.

Not help for American business.

Recently the Biden administration issued new answers for Americans invested in Chinese companies with direct ties to Beijing’s military. Previously, U.S. policy was that Americans were forbidden to invest in companies included in a “blacklist” of Chinese companies directly involved in China’s military, and in producing applications used by the Communist regime to oppress its own people and threaten its neighbors. The new “answers” amount to a wholesale abandonment of a policy Americans of all political stripes supported.

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

New York Times Lectures and Hectors Israel When will “the paper of record” ever treat Israel fairly? Hugh Fitzgerald

By on June 15th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/new-york-times-lectures-and-hectors-israel-hugh-fitzgerald/

The New York Times doesn’t much care for Israel. Its reporters always find some flaw to exaggerate, some Palestinian atrocity to explain away, some “settlers” in the “occupied West Bank” to denounce, some new way to libel the inoffensive, warmhearted, and permanently imperiled Jewish state. It recently ran a “staff editorial” on the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akhleh which, for connoisseurs of its anti-Israel slant, did not disappoint. A report by Ira Stoll on this editorial that lectured and hectored Israel on “what it must do,” is here: “New York Times Editorial Lectures: ‘Israelis Should Care More,’” by Ira Stoll, Algemeiner, June 9, 2022:

The New York Times these days only rarely publishes staff editorials, and it saves the ones it thinks are most important for the Sunday newspaper, which attracts the largest readership.

This past Sunday, which was also the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, the Times unleashed an editorial headlined “Who Killed Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh?” The question is rhetorical, because the Times editorialists have already clearly decided who is to blame. You guessed it, Israel. The Times insists: “Israel needs to ensure the safety of journalists in the country and in areas that it occupies, to ensure the safety of its own democracy.”

The Times assumes that we all agree on who killed Abu Akleh – Israel. But despite the claims of the Palestinians, and the Timesmen who parrot them, it is not known, and cannot be known, until the bullet that killed her can be subject to ballistic tests by forensic experts. Israel is not insisting that it alone must conduct those tests – they could be carried out jointly with the PA and the American government. However, the PA adamantly refuses to produce the bullet, without explanation. That apparently doesn’t bother the New York Times, which sees nothing suspicious in the PA’s failure to produce the bullet. So Israel will be forced to issue an incomplete report, unable either to implicate or exculpate itself, until that bullet can be made available for forensic analysis.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Bizarro World: Mega-Terrorist Turkey When it comes to Turkey, Western countries behave like weaklings. David Boyajian

By on June 15th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/bizarro-world-mega-terrorist-turkey-david-boyajian/

Welcome to bizarro world.

That’s where Turkey, a notorious state sponsor of international terrorism, has the sheer gall to accuse Finland and Sweden of supporting terrorists.

Even more bizarre: Neither Finland, Sweden, the U.S., NATO, EU, nor any country or leader has, to my knowledge, pointed out Ankara’s glaring hypocrisy.

Turkey claims that Finland and Sweden host members of the PKK, the militant Kurdish organization that the U.S. and EU regard as terrorists. Both Nordic nations deny the charge.

Like many Europeans, however, Finns and Swedes sympathize with Kurds. Turkey has long repressed and ethnically cleansed the latter.

Regardless, Ankara is blocking uber-civilized Finland and Sweden from joining NATO.

Ironically, Turkey — autocratic, infamously violative of human rights, and systemically corrupt — would be unqualified to join NATO today were it not already a member.

The point is, who is Turkey to accuse others of terrorism?

Mega-Terrorist Turkey

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BOOKS Comments turned off

The Crushing of Tibet-Michael M. Rosen

By on June 15th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/27/the-crushing-of-tibet/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

When the Iron Bird Flies: China’s Secret War in Tibet, by Jianglin Li (Stanford University Press, 576 pp., $35)

The recent depredations of the People’s Republic of China in East Turkestan/Xinjiang have had the unfortunate effect of obscuring and displacing a similar oppression that the Chinese perpetrated in another region: Tibet. More than half a century before it began persecuting the Uyghurs, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) engineered and executed a brutal, enduring domination of Tibet that persists today. But while the Tibetan cause enjoyed its heyday in the West in the 1990s, the region has largely faded from the headlines since.

Jianglin Li, a historian of Tibet, seeks to remedy this forgetfulness. In When the Iron Bird Flies, a masterly account of the CCP’s invasion and subjugation of the Tibetan regions in the 1950s, Li exhumes decades of archival Chinese records and interviews survivors of the onslaught. She tells the story through the eyes of the overwhelmed and ultimately defeated Tibetans, as well as from the point of view of the CCP officials who quelled their hard-fought rebellion.

While even the Chinese-nationalist government had sought to integrate Tibet into the Chinese body politic in the first half of the 20th century, the story truly begins with Mao Zedong’s rise to power. He was determined, no matter the cost, to swallow the Tibetan provinces of U-Tsang, Amdo, and Kham — which form more than a fifth of contemporary China by area. On January 2, 1950, Mao, visiting Moscow, cabled the CCP Central Committee, noting that “although the population of Tibet is not large, its international status is crucial. We must occupy Tibet and reform it into a people’s democracy.” Not for Mao the traditional religious and herding lifestyle of this peaceful people of the northwest steppe; they must be fundamentally remade in the image of Socialist Man.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Jerry Nadler on the Rocks?A blockbuster primary pits two long-serving Democrats against each other.By Arjun Singh

By on June 15th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/jerry-nadler-on-the-rocks/

You don’t often see political heavyweights in a fight to the death in the midterms. Incumbents usually win — and when they don’t, it can be because they were caught by surprise, whether in a primary or general election, heralding a larger wave.

Recall Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who was taken down by Tea Party upstart Dave Brat in 2014 — the first time in history that a sitting House leader had lost in a primary. More recently, AOC felled Joe Crowley, the Democratic Caucus chairman, which marked the ascendance of the New Left.

Sometimes, incumbents do lose. But rarely do they lose to each other in races that pit powerful politicians against each other, fighting for political survival. One such battle is unfolding in New York City between two powerful House Democrats. Congressman Jerry Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is running in a primary against Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, for New York’s twelfth congressional district. Both are high-profile members who’ve been in Congress for decades and vehemently opposed the Trump agenda more recently. It was Nadler atop the Judiciary Committee who pushed both of Trump’s impeachments through the House, led arguments against him in the first trial, and investigated his administration on a host of other issues. Maloney, meanwhile, hauled the heads of agency after agency before her committee for oversight hearings to grill them on Trump’s policies — especially immigration. They’ve continued chairing these powerful bodies into the Biden years. With these credentials, each has high name recognition and high fund-raising potential. They’d be near-unbeatable in their seats on their own.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Biden and the Powerless Presidency Byron York

By on June 15th, 2022

https://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2022/06/15/joe-biden-and-the-powerless-presidency-n2608742

There’s no doubt inflation is the nation’s most pressing concern. All the polls show it. All the data shows it. And everyone just personally knows it.

President Joe Biden will not admit that his policies, and his party’s policies, have made inflation worse — and that, if Biden and congressional Democrats had their way, they would make it worse still. He just can’t say that. Instead, the president’s reaction has been a mixture of denial, finger pointing, ineffective gestures and, perhaps most of all, the argument that he, as president, is virtually powerless to address the nation’s most pressing concern.

“Look, inflation is the bane of our existence,” Biden said when he appeared recently in a sympathetic forum, comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show. Kimmel was so sympathetic that he didn’t even ask Biden about inflation; Biden brought it up himself. But he had little to say. Remember that when Biden published his plan to fight inflation in The Wall Street Journal on May 30, his first measure was not to do anything himself but to let the Federal Reserve do the job. His role as president, Biden said, was not to say anything mean about the Fed.

As for all the other, little stuff Biden is doing in the name of fighting inflation, there are reports that he knows they won’t do any good. On April 12, for example, he went to an ethanol plant in Iowa to claim that alternative fuels lower energy costs. Ethanol is great, Biden said. It supports agriculture, creates good-paying jobs, reduces U.S. reliance on foreign oil and reduces the price of gasoline.

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