FOREIGN POLICY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Putin’s War Crimes: Reported Heroes and Others by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on March 11th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18314/putin-war-crimes-heroes

While many extraordinary American companies have voluntarily taken serious financial setbacks as their contribution to defending Ukraine — now the front line in a war on the Free World by Russian President Vladimir Putin — other companies have revealed themselves as indifferent at best.

Putin has curated a long track record of turning Grozny to rubble, flattening Aleppo, devouring Georgia and Crimea, and now has been dropping cluster and vacuum bombs, banned by the Geneva Conventions, on civilian targets in Ukraine. His troops have also attacked and taken over nuclear reactors, and Putin has repeatedly agreed to humanitarian evacuation routes that, when people emerge, the Russians shell — all in sub-zero, dead-of-winter weather. The problem: if Putin is allowed to take Ukraine, it will result in further annexations in Europe. The failure to contain aggressive acts results in further aggressive acts.

It is important immediately to follow the impressive example of worldwide heroes, above all, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. British Petroleum willingly absorbed a $25 billion loss. Elon Musk immediately made his Starlink satellite broadband internet service available in Ukraine and donated Starlink terminals to the people of Ukraine, in the event that their cyber capability was downed.

FOREIGN POLICY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kamala invades Poland: Witness the art of cackle diplomacy-Roger Kimball

Posted By on March 11th, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/kamala-harris-poland-diplomacy-ukraine/

You can tell that the Biden administration is getting serious. They have unleashed their ultimate weapon, cackle diplomacy.  The warhead is nicknamed Harris, and it is now in Poland cackling away, endeavoring to assemble the high-level Pierogis before Russia flattens Kyiv or Putin decides to go nuclear — and by “go nuclear,” alas, I mean “go nuclear.”

Some observers say that sending Kamala Harris on this mission will give her a chance to “burnish” her foreign policy credentials. Cynical folks — and I would include myself in that group — think it is just another emission of fog by America’s first certifiably senile administration.

“Ukraine is a country in Europe,” Harris recently explained to universal hilarity, “it exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we stand for.”

Did I mention that the hilarity was laced with feelings of appalled panic? This, after all, was the vice president of the United States.

The messaging about Russia has not been particularly consistent. We all hate Putin: that message was clear enough. And we are all supposed to fawn over the latest pin-up from Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky.

There are a few other things that the official directive specifies. We’re not supposed to mention the thirty bioresearch labs that the US maintains in Ukraine. We are not supposed to mention Ukrainian support for Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, its government’s efforts to undermine Donald Trump, or its connection with George Soros, Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset,” or its lavish financial support of the Biden family and the families of other high-ranking Americans. All that is off-script, so, even though it is potentially clarifying, I won’t mention it.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

THE STENCH OF SPYGATE: It won’t go away, no matter how much the media ignores it. by George Neumayr

Posted By on March 11th, 2022

https://spectator.org/the-stench-of-spygate/

The more we learn about the Obama administration’s spying on Donald Trump, the worse it looks. The investigation into his alleged collusion with Russia never had any foundation to it. Feverish partisans pushed for the probe. Chief among them were John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director who despised Trump, and Peter Strzok, Brennan’s FBI liaison who texted his mistress that he was going to “stop” Trump.

The partisan origins of the probe are impossible to deny. But were they illegal? Can an administration just open up an investigation on a political opponent based on partisan hunches? This remains to be seen. Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has said that “quite a few more indictments” are likely to come from special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the probe. “[Then-Attorney General] Bill Barr, John Durham, and I, all looking at this intelligence, agreed there was not a proper predicate to open a criminal investigation into the Trump campaign, yet that happened,” he said.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Green Immoralists Elite ideology divorced from reality impoverishes people and can get them killed. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 10th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/09/the-green-immoralists/

Thousands are dying from Russian missiles and bombs in the suburbs of Ukraine. 

In response, the Biden Administration’s climate-change envoy, multimillionaire and private-jet owning John Kerry, laments that Russian president Vladimir Putin might no longer remain his partner in reducing global warming.

“You’re going to lose people’s focus,” Kerry frets. “You’re going to lose big-country attention because they will be diverted, and I think it could have a damaging impact”

“Impact”? 

Did the global moralist Kerry mean by “impact” the over 650 Russian missiles that impacted Ukrainian buildings and tore apart children? 

Are Russian soldiers losing their green “focus”? When Putin threatens nuclear war is he merely “diverted”? Would letting off a few nukes be “damaging” to the human environment?

Climate-change moralists love humanity so much in the abstract that they must shut down its life-giving gas, coal, and oil in the concrete. And they value humans so little that they don’t worry in the here and now that ensuing fuel shortages and exorbitant costs cause wars, spike inflation, and threaten people’s ability to travel or keep warm.

The Biden Administration stopped all gas and oil production in the ANWR region of Alaska. It ended all new federal leases for drilling. It is cancelling major new pipelines. It is leveraging lending agencies not to finance oil and gas drilling. 

It helped force the cancellation of the EastMed pipeline that would have brought needed natural gas to southern Europe. And it has in just a year managed to turn the greatest oil and gas producer in the history of the world into a pathetic global fossil-fuel beggar. 

Now gas is heading to well over $5 a gallon. In overregulated blue states, it will likely hit $7. 

The result is left-wing terror that the voters in the coming midterm election might rightly blame Democrats for hamstringing the American ability to travel, keep warm in winter and cool in summer, and buy affordable food.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

VACATION: MARCH 3- MARCH 10

Posted By on March 2nd, 2022

RESUMING ON FRIDAY MARCH 11

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s ‘Capitulation’ To Iran Endangers Arabs, Middle East, U.S. by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on March 2nd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18284/biden-capitulation-iran

“The parties of the international community that are negotiating with Iran…. must realize that the extremist Iranian regime has not, and will not, abide by international laws, regulations and agreements, even if it swore and signed or pledged to abide by and implement them. The Iranian regime was founded on the… Khomeini ideology that adopts terrorism and believes in exporting chaos and destruction.” — Dr. Ibrahim al-Nahhas, Saudi political analyst and academic, Al-Riyadh, February 23, 2022.

The Khomeini ideology… has already brought destruction to Arab countries, including Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria. — Dr. Ibrahim al-Nahhas, Al-Riyadh, February 23, 2022.

“Although the Biden administration pledged upon its arrival at the White House that it would not be a third term for former President Barack Obama, it is following him step by step. This is evident in the Biden administration’s position on the Iranian nuclear issue. This position seems to be weak, hesitant and subject to Iranian blackmail…. In the end, the countries of the region will not accept being hostage to Iranian nuclear technology.” — Rami Al-Khalifa Al-Ali, Syrian political analyst, Okaz, February 23, 2022.

The most dangerous point is that the US administration “has ignored other issues in which Iran poses a threat to the region, including the ballistic missile program” as well as the terrorist militias. — Rami Al-Khalifa Al-Ali, Okaz, February 23, 2022.

“These militias are Iran’s arm in the region and they intend to spread chaos and destruction wherever they are. The [new] agreement is expected to unleash Iran’s hand in the region, as what happened during the Obama era, which led to an increase in violence in the region.” — Rami Al-Khalifa Al-Ali, Okaz, February 23, 2022.

“It is not surprising that Vladimir Putin went to the end in Ukraine after discovering that he faced an American administration that could not be more than an extension of Barack Obama’s administration. The Biden administration can yell and threaten as much as it wants.” — Kheirallah Kheirallah, veteran Lebanese journalist, Al-Arab, February 16, 2022.

In [Fahs’s] view, not reaching any agreement would be better than reaching a new one. “The lack of agreement will keep the conflict with Iran confined to the great powers.” — Mustafa Fahs, Lebanese editor, Asharq Al-Awsat, February 25, 2022.

“Biden has decided to acquiesce in Iran… to yield to its expansionist project, which ultimately aims to impose Iranian hegemony in the region.” — Sayed Zahra, deputy editor of the Bahraini newspaper Akhbar Al-Khaleej, February 25, 2022.

“In other words, it means that Iran and its proxies feel at liberty to do whatever they want. We should expect that reaching a new agreement with Iran will mark the inauguration of a new era of escalation of the Iranian terrorist threat in the region. The Arab countries must prepare for this.” — Sayed Zahra, Akhbar Al-Khaleej, February 25, 2022.

Most disturbing is what a growing number of Arabs are trying to warn the Biden administration about: that striking a new deal with Iran would not only embolden Iran and its terrorist proxies and endanger America’s friends in the Middle East, but create calamitous turmoil, including a nuclear arms race “on steroids” in the region — all of which would justifiably be blamed on the Biden administration. It appears that the Biden administration has chosen to ignore the likelihood of this terrifying scenario. It is a decision that is causing irreparable damage to America’s credibility in the Middle East.

Moreover, as Arab analysts are saying in no uncertain terms, America and its Western allies are themselves in the sights of the mullahs in Tehran.

Worse, as with Biden’s generosity to Russian President Vladimir Putin in extending the new START treaty and gifting him the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline (which yesterday filed for bankruptcy), it will not buy goodwill. It will only appear as weakness and accelerate aggression against the West.

As the world’s attention is focused on the Russia-Ukraine war, the Arabs are continuing to express fear about the possibility that the Biden administration and the world powers will revive the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

The Increased Cyber Warfare Threat from a New Sino-Russo Alliance As NATO forces assemble to address the Ukraine crisis, the new Sino-Russo partnership may initiate a series of cyberattacks that are more destructive than any in global history. By Julio Rivera

Posted By on March 2nd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/01/the-increased-cyber-warfare-threat-from-a-new-sino-russo-alliance/

With the start of conventional warfare in the battle for control of Ukraine, many Americans wrongly assume that unless U.S. troops are deployed within the forces promised by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, this will be just another in the seemingly never-ending list of conflicts, wars, and skirmishes that may have little, if any, direct damaging effects on the United States.

We can certainly talk of the numerous economic implications of this war in eastern Europe. We can perhaps even argue that conflict may benefit the United States, as it might serve to provide a much-needed wakeup call to the Biden Administration that reversing the Trump-era energy policy and throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at an aggressive Russia only enabled this costly and destructive military endeavor.

Also enabling this brazen action from Russia is the weakness projected by yet another Democratic Party politician who has been forced to endure the indignity of having his red line ignored by a ruthless dictator. 

As a result, this new war will certainly signify the permanent arrival of what will be the most common theater of war in the future—the cybersphere. 

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The Coming Medical Dictatorship Can you guess what California Democrats want to make illegal? Joseph Hippolito

Posted By on March 2nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/coming-medical-dictatorship-joseph-hippolito/

Today, Canada. Tomorrow, California?

If that state’s Democrats have their way, the Golden State could well become this nation’s version of the Great White North.

Two bills introduced five days apart in the Assembly, the Legislature’s lower house, expose the Democrats’ plan to exploit COVID-19 to seize absolute power.

On Feb. 10, four Assembly members introduced AB 1993, a bill that would force anybody with a job — whether full-time employees or independent contractors — to prove they were vaccinated against COVID-19. The bill states its provisions would expire when “the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices determines that COVID-19 vaccinations are no longer necessary for the health and safety of individuals.”

Then on Feb. 15, one of the members who introduced that bill proposed AB 2098, which would rescind the medical license of any doctor circulating “misinformation” about COVID-19 or vaccines designed to treat it.

Six Democrats are promoting both bills. They are Assembly members Buffy Wicks, Evan Low, Cecilia Aguiar-Curry and Akilah Weber, and state senators Richard Pan and Scott Wiener. Four other Democrats are among AB 1993’s co-authors. Senators Bill Dodd and Josh Newman are listed as principal co-authors, with Assemblymen Bill Quirk and Mark Stone as secondary co-authors.

BOOKS, EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Campus Jew Hatred Rising An interview with the author of a new Freedom Center ebook. Mark Tapson

Posted By on March 2nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/campus-jew-hatred-rising-mark-tapson/

In a free new ebook from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, author and regular FrontPage Mag contributor Richard L. Cravatts Ph.D., a Shillman Fellow at the Center, counters the lies and misrepresentations of the pro-Palestinian movement on American campuses, exposing its roots in the ancient animus of Jew hatred and the genocidal threat of Islamic supremacism.

Jew Hatred Rising: The perversities of the campus war against Israel and the Jews can be downloaded as a PDF document or read in full at this link. In it, Dr. Cravatts deconstructs, with forceful eloquence, the arguments of pro-Palestinian activists who declare Israel to be illegitimate while championing the nonexistent nation of “Palestine.” He also describes the hostile campus climate that BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) activists have created for Jewish students, who are smeared as racists for supporting a Jewish state and denied equal participation in student affairs.

“The notion of ‘two states living sides by side in peace,’ as the oft-repeated refrain goes, is, and always has been, of complete irrelevance to the Arabs,” Cravatts writes of the rising “new antisemitism.” “The creation of a new Arab state is not the sought-after goal; what is the actual goal is the extirpation of the Jewish one.”

I posed some questions to Dr. Cravatts about his new book.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ultranationalist appeasers: Le Pen, Mélenchon & Zemmour side with Russia: a discussion with Nidra Poller  by Jerry Gordon

Posted By on March 2nd, 2022

https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/ultranationalist-appeasers-le-pen-melenchon-zemmour-side-with-russia-a-discussion-with-nidra-poller/

On the cusp of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there were disturbing revelations about this issue in the French Presidential election campaign in this our fifth monthly discussion with Nidra Poller, on February 18th There were statements by ultranationalist candidates on both the far left and far right dismissing the looming threat of Russian President to the Western alliance and world order.

President Macron shifted into high gear in diplomatic initiatives having an audience with Putin in Moscow and on the eve of Russia’s invasion Macron made a 105-minute phone call with Putin followed by one with Ukraine’s President Wolodymyr Zelensky, who promptly announced that he would meet with Putin. Zelensky made a sudden trip to the Munich Security Conference the same day, chastising Western appeasement of Putin pressing for immediate imposition of sanctions. He remarked:

“Ukraine is longing for peace, Europe is longing for Peace, the world is saying it doesn’t want any war, while Russia claiming she doesn’t want to intervene – someone here is lying.”

Zelensky got his answer that evening. Backed by Russia’s Duma, Putin signed treaties with the unelected leaders of the two breakaway Ukrainian provinces recognizing their “independence.”  Brushing aside last-minute calls for diplomatic initiatives, Putin used the pretext of “false Flag” Ukrainian actions to send in so-called “peacekeepers” followed by tanks, vehicles and more. The reaction was a salvo of world critical of Putin’s demarch followed by a veritable fusillade of economic and financial sanctions directed at key Russian Banks and oligarchs close to Putin announced by US President Biden, the UK, EU, Japan, South Korea. Even China’s Xi-Jinping urged “caution” to his erstwhile geo-political partner. Ukrainian President Zelensky announced a State of Emergency mobilizing his 250,000 troops to oppose the 190,000 Russian forces surrounding his country on three sides. We knew what would come of this Russian action given Putin’s precedents in the 2008 War against The Republic of Georgia, which resulted his seizure of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and in 2014 seizure of the Crimea and sending in troops to support the rebels in the breakaway eastern Donetsk and Luhansk region. French philosopher and activist Bernard-Henri Lévy penned a Tablet op ed, “The Rape of Ukraine.”  His dour forecast: “Taking Putin’s grievances seriously would be nothing more than a death wish for a return to the terrible 20th Century.”