Displaying the most recent of 92136 posts written by

Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Promised A Return To Normalcy, Looks Like Trump Will Deliver It

By on December 20th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/20/biden-promised-a-return-to-normalcy-looks-like-trump-will-deliver-it/

What do a $15 million settlement with ABC News, a Washington, D.C., waitress getting fired, and the Los Angeles Times planning to include a bias meter in its news stories have in common?

They are all welcome signs that the nation is embracing normalcy once again – something that Joe Biden was allegedly going to restore after Donald Trump’s supposedly chaotic years.

Trump’s first term was chaotic, but not because of what he did so much as the four-year hysteria unleashed by his opponents.

Biden, on the other hand, brought true chaos. A tainted election, foreign wars, open borders, runaway inflation, exploding deficits, shortages, censorship, weaponized justice, incompetence, two assassination attempts, rising disunity, despair.

But now that the left’s unhinged efforts to silence conservative voices and block Trump’s reelection have been soundly defeated, a return to some semblance of normalcy is actually possible.

ABC News’ settlement – which includes a public apology in addition to the $15 million to settle a defamation case over “journalist” George Stephanopoulos’ repeated assertion that Trump had been found “liable for rape” – is a sign that news media can’t do or say whatever it wants to push an agenda.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Court allows student’s suit to move forward at Carnegie Mellon Yael Canaan’s submission of a Jewish-related architecture project resulted in a professor saying that she should have explored “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”

By on December 20th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/court-allows-students-suit-to-move-forward-at-carnegie-mellon/?utm_campaign=

Pennsylvania Judge Scott Hardy released an opinion on Tuesday affirming that a discrimination lawsuit could proceed against Carnegie Mellon University, a private academic institution in Pittsburgh. Yael Canaan, a graduate of the school who is Jewish and has Israeli heritage, alleges numerous incidents of bigotry and a failure of administrators to properly respond to them.

The suit, filed by the Lawfare Project in 2023, describes an incident when Canaan presented her architecture project on May 5, 2022, to Mary-Lou Arscott, a professor and associate head for design fundamentals at the architecture school.

Canaan had created a model to depict a wire fence eruv—an enclosure used by Orthodox Jews to permit certain activities not usually allowed on Shabbat, such as wheeling a stroller or carrying an object.

Arscott reportedly replied that “the wall in the model looked like the wall Israelis use to barricade Palestinians out of Israel,” and that Canaan’s time would have been better spent on a project that focused on “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”

The suit describes the steps Canaan took to address the statement and the lack of assistance from the school’s administration to support her. One professor she reached out to for help, adjunct instructor Theodossis Issaias, allegedly lambasted her for “acting like a victim” and “calling all of us antisemites.” He allegedly said he was “not there to fight her battles for her” and that he “cannot be an advocate for the Jews.”

The suit states that Issaias showed hostility to Canaan in class, which other students noted, and gave her a low grade that prevented her from receiving an honors degree and put her scholarship at risk.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

‘Astounding’ government failures, House GOP report on Jew-hatred says “It’s our intent to take this report, its recommendations, and act,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson stated. Andrew Bernard

By on December 20th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/astounding-government-failures-house-gop-report-on-jew-hatred-says/?utm_campaign=

U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) released an investigative report from six congressional committees about Jew-hatred in the United States after Hamas’s terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

The Republican staff report, which is based on seven months of committee investigations, describes “astounding” failures on the part of federal government departments and agencies. The report, which was released on Thursday, states that universities across the country likely violated the civil rights of Jews in their handling of anti-Israel campus protests.

“It’s our intent to take this report, its recommendations, and act,” Johnson stated. “We’ll use what’s in here to continue protecting our Jewish brothers and sisters from discrimination and violence. But make no mistake, we will continue these efforts in the next Congress, and anytime antisemitism rears its ugly head, the House will shine a light on it and take action.”

The report’s conclusions focus largely on the failures of universities to respond to anti-Israel campus protests which began after Oct. 7 but that turned into a nationwide wave of tent encampments. That wave followed students occupying Columbia University’s South Lawn ahead of Minouche Shafik’s testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee. (Shafik resigned as the Columbia president in August.)

Continue reading →
HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Iran-Affiliated Venezuelan Gangs Invited Into the United States by Robert Williams

By on December 20th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21226/venezuelan-gangs-invited-into-us

“Border Patrol zones across Texas, Arizona and California had no agent presence for weeks and months at a time. Those who did not want to be caught could simply walk in. We have no idea who and what entered our country over this time.” — Aaron Heitke, retired chief patrol agent for the San Diego Sector of the U.S. Border Patrol, testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, September 18, 2024.

“Simultaneously, in San Diego we had an exponential increase in [Special] Interest Aliens (SIAs). These are aliens with significant ties to terrorism…. I was told I could not release any information on this increase in SIA’s or mention any of the arrests. The administration was trying to convince the public that there was no threat at the border.” — Aaron Heitke, testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, September 18, 2024.

More than half a million Venezuelans have entered the US illegally since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Until Biden became president, few Venezuelans arrived illegally. Only around 4,500 arrived in 2020. After Biden’s inauguration, however, numbers exploded: 50,499 Venezuelans illegally entered in 2021, another 189,520 in 2022 and a whopping 334,914 in 2023.

This means that Venezuelans now rank second in illegal immigration into the US, after Mexicans, who still take the number one spot.

For more than two decades, Venezuela has been a close ally of Iran, and a regional home base for Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in the Middle East. Hezbollah, according to one 2020 Atlantic Council report, helped to “turn Venezuela into a hub for the convergence of transnational organized crime and international terrorism.”

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Hamas’ Gaza death toll questioned as new report says its led to ‘widespread inaccuracies and distortion’ By Beth Bailey | Fox News

By on December 20th, 2024

Entries identifying men as women, adults as children among errors noted by research team in conflict numbers widely cited by media

A new report cites a laundry list of alleged errors in the casualty tallies that the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health has issued during the conflict in Gaza, and found that worldwide media widely report the inflated numbers with little or no scrutiny.

The Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a U.K. based think tank, found “widespread inaccuracies and distortion in the data collection process” for the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) which has resulted in a “misleading picture of the conflict.” The study also analyzed how journalists worldwide have spread misleading MoH data without noting its shortcomings or offering alternative information from Israeli sources.

The report’s author, Andrew Fox, a fellow at HJS said his team’s research is based on lists of casualty figures that the MoH has released through Telegram as well as lists released by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Fox said he and his team have been able to examine segments of the reporting, despite changeable MoH data being “really hard to interrogate.” 

On Tuesday, Gaza health authorities updated its number of dead to what it said was more than 45,000.

The report said the ministry’s reporting long indicated that women and children made up more than half of the war dead, leading to accusations that Israel intentionally kills civilians in Gaza.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Abigail Shrier Was Vilified. Now She’s Been Vindicated.

By on December 18th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-was-vilified-youth-gender-care?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The author uncovered the truth about the dangers of transitioning minors—and stood up to bans, boycotts, and smears.

Some researchers, who at great personal risk challenge the received wisdom of their day, never get the satisfaction of seeing their work vindicated. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened to Abigail Shrier.

Shrier is the author of the groundbreaking 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. It is a meticulous, humane, and harrowing account of the sudden and explosive rise in teenage girls declaring themselves to be males. The book is also an examination of a new branch of medicine that has encouraged, and profited from, swiftly putting these distressed girls on powerful hormones, and performing double mastectomies and other surgeries on them.

In working on the book, Shrier found that the claims that daughters could be, and should be, turned into sons was reckless, and that transgender medicine was functioning more like a cult than a scientifically based specialty. The truth of what she revealed has been comprehensively substantiated.

She documented how devastated parents were lied to and coerced. A favorite tactic of gender clinicians was to tell parents that if they didn’t consent to life-altering treatments with a long list of side effects, including sterility, their girls were likely to commit suicide. Parents were routinely asked, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?”

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Jesse Singal: Bluesky Has a Death Threat Problem

By on December 18th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/jesse-singal-bluesky-has-a-death-threat-problem?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

It was supposed to be a gentler, left-wing alternative to X. My grim experience proves that just isn’t the case.

Recently, like a lot of journalists, I joined Bluesky, a social media platform that is enjoying a burst of postelection growth and positive press attention. It’s been lauded as a “kinder, gentler”—and, perhaps most importantly, more left-wing—alternative to X, which is increasingly seen as infested with what a Bluesky user might call “MAGA chuds.”

While I thought some of the critiques of X were overstated, over the last six months or so I’ve increasingly soured on it. It felt like an ever more hostile, hateful place, the technology seemed more broken every day, and I am not a fan of owner Elon Musk’s recent conspiracy theorizing and all-in support for Donald Trump. It seemed like time to scope out a potential alternative.

This was a mistake.

On December 6, I made my first post on Bluesky—which was actually launched by Twitter in 2019, before becoming an independent company two years later. As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.

There’s at least some evidence for the latter theory. While many left-wing people announced they were leaving X after the election, one million users joined Bluesky that week. The results weren’t pretty. As The Verge reported on November 17, “the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours.” That’s more than 10 percent of the number received in the entirety of 2023, which was 360,000.

But given what I’ve learned about Bluesky’s “moderation” over the last week, I feel compelled to inform the site’s users—and potential users—about its staggeringly negligent policies toward violent threats and doxxing.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Michael Murphy Ireland’s anti-Israel stance is embarrassingly hypocritical The Taoiseach seems only to be in favour of international law and human rights when it suits him

By on December 18th, 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/18/irelands-anti-israel-stance-is-embarrassingly-hypocritical/

Ireland and Israel are now locked in a zero-sum war of reputation destruction. On Sunday, Israel announced it was closing its Dublin embassy because of the “extreme anti-Israel policies of the Irish government”. It then doubled down, branding the Taoiseach, Simon Harris, an anti-Semite. An irate Harris shot back that Israel was merely attempting to distract from its “killing” of children.

These accusations are so grave it’s difficult to see how either side can walk them back. Who, after all, would make such claims frivolously?

Let’s consider for a moment what led both countries to go nuclear. Since the start of the war in Gaza, the Irish government has been one of Israel’s most strident critics. It backed South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), claiming there was sufficient evidence to answer the charge. But just last week, it went further, calling to “broaden” the definition of genocide to vaguely include civilian harm, effectively turning Israel into a perpetrator of a crime yet to exist.

For Jerusalem, this attempt to shift legal goalposts, redefining established terms to engineer guilt, was the final straw. After years of diplomatic snubs, boycotts, and genocide accusations – not to mention Ireland’s recognition of a Palestinian state soon after October 7 – Israel decided to cut its losses. “We will now channel and transfer resources to a place that is interested in cooperating with us,” its ambassador explained.

The Taoiseach, for his part, called the decision regrettable but dismissed accusations of Irish hostility toward Israel. “We’re just pro-peace, pro-human rights, and pro-international law,” he protested. But Ireland’s record speaks louder than platitudes.

Ireland is for international law when it suits. That’s why it now seeks to rewrite the Genocide Convention – an international cornerstone ratified by 153 states, including Ireland – to retroactively lower the bar for convicting Israel. This more closely resembles authoritarian justice, where the accused is condemned first and the crime tailored to fit. As Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria put it: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Charles Lipson Joe Biden has vanished, leaving behind an almighty mess The president has disappeared from view during the long interregnum before Donald Trump takes power

By on December 18th, 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/12/17/has-anyone-seen-joe-biden/

America and Britain share a rightful pride in the peaceful transfer of power. But they conduct the transfer very differently. The British vote in a day, count the votes that night, and install a new government almost immediately. Shadow ministers are ready to take over. 

Not in America, which takes weeks to cast ballots and, often, just as long to count them. This year, analysts were shocked to find the winner could be called on election night, a rarity due to Donald Trump’s victory in all seven “swing states”. It took longer to count the votes for other federal offices, sometimes much longer. In California, one congressional seat wasn’t decided until early December. Soviet workers got new cars faster.

Even if the votes had been counted swiftly, America’s new government would still have waited over two months before taking office. It used to take even longer. Until 1933, when the 20th Amendment was passed, the new president didn’t take office until early March. The vote was still held in early November.

Despite the Amendment, there’s still a two-month pause before the new president takes office. That gap poses dangers internationally and domestically. Foreign foes may choose to act while the old team is still in power, fearing the new administration may be tougher (as they do now) or less predictable. Domestically, the incumbent administration and lame-duck Congress have a last-minute chance to push through their priorities. The outgoing Congress can pass laws, the outgoing president can issue executive orders, and departing White House aides and Cabinet members can rush money out the door before the new administration cuts off funding for their pet projects.

Although such problems recur at the end of every presidency, they are always more serious when the other party is about to take power. They are even worse when the incoming president will have a new majority in Congress, as Trump will this time. That’s why president Biden’s team is trying to push through as many lifetime judicial appointments as possible before the Senate switches to Republican control.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Tries To Make a Stand in Jenin by Seth Mandel

By on December 18th, 2024

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/iran-tries-to-make-a-stand-in-jenin/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–

The future of Gaza depends to some extent on what’s happening in Jenin this week.

The West Bank city is a hotbed of Iranian-backed militias who have spent years carving out a separatist haven there. It is a significant challenge to Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. Both Israel and the Palestinians who want self-determination share an interest in preventing the Iranian colonial project from accomplishing its primary aim in the West Bank: Palestinian civil war and the disintegration of the Palestinian Authority.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, that has only become more urgent. At some point, the PA is expected to take over the administration of the Gaza Strip after Hamas is removed from power. If Abbas cannot maintain control over the West Bank, the PA cannot take on Gaza as well.

And so Abbas’s decision to send Palestinian security forces into Jenin is a crucial test for the aging autocrat and his government.

“The gunmen in Jenin are not resistance fighters, but mercenaries serving the dubious agenda of an outside party,” declared PA spokesman Anwar Rajab.

The New York Times describes the riddle that the PA, Israel, and the U.S. are trying to solve. Israel has been stepping up its security raids in Jenin because Abbas is barely able to step foot in the city. Israel does not want an Iranian terror-and-tunnel project in the West Bank to match the one currently undergoing disassembly in Gaza. The U.S. wants Israel to back off a bit, to enable the Palestinian security forces to gather the strength to take back Jenin. But if Israel backs off too much or for too long, the PA will fail when it does try to restore order there.

That happened last week, in fact. According to Axios, Palestinian security forces fumbled a mission in which they were trying to arrest “several PIJ and Hamas militants who stole Palestinian security forces vehicles and used them for an armed parade through the refugee camp.” The mission failure, then was a double humiliation.

Continue reading →