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Confronting the Threat of Iran’s Regime by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on August 25th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20886/confronting-iran-threat

The exorbitantly lenient approach of the Biden-Harris administration has allowed Iran to reach unprecedented levels of power, influence and bellicosity.

Iran and Qatar have for decades been the source of all the instability in the region and much of it beyond.

Qatar has been poisoning American education with at least $6 billion in unreported “gifts and agreements,” and Iran, while building forward bases in Cuba and Venezuela, is busy cyber-hacking the U.S. and trying to assassinate U.S. officials on American soil.

It is clearly time for America to go back to the policy of peace and prosperity in the Middle East and a pro-freedom agenda in American universities – as opposed to financing terrorists, their sponsors and especially Iran’s virulently anti-Western and anti-American nuclear weapons program.

The policies of the Biden-Harris administration, including turning a blind eye to Iran’s nuclear advancements, its destabilizing actions in the Middle East and the release of billions of dollars to the Iranian terror empire, have undoubtedly empowered Iran’s regime, granting it the freedom to pursue its Islamist fundamentalist ambitions, including its ultimate goals of annihilating Israel and disabling the United States.

The exorbitantly lenient approach of the Biden-Harris administration has allowed Iran to reach unprecedented levels of power, influence and bellicosity. Iran is now openly providing military support to Russia in its ongoing war to conquer Ukraine. Iran’s regime has also activated its proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis — to launch attacks on Israel. Even more alarming is Iran’s direct aggression towards Israel and the acceleration of its nuclear weapons program, scenarios that would have been unimaginable during previous administrations.

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The Only Award Qatar Deserves: Supporting Islamist Terrorism by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on August 23rd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20891/qatar-award-supporting-terrorism

It is grotesque that Qatar should be recognized for its contributions to “maintaining national and regional security” in the Middle East given that it has long been openly supporting Islamist terrorist organizations and serving as a home and haven for the Hamas leadership.

“[H]istory will not forget that the Qatari Al-Jazeera was and still is a platform for leaders of terrorism…. Al-Jazeera is now playing the same tole in spreading speeches of the leader of the Al-Houthi terrorist militia.” — General Secretariat of the Council of Senior [Islamic] Scholars in Saudi Arabia, March 27, 2018.

Not much has changed in Qatar since then…. Al-Jazeera, meanwhile, continues to serve as a mouthpiece of terrorist organizations, especially Hamas, whose leaders are frequently given a platform to promote terrorism. Saudi social media pundit Mesha’al Al-Khalid wrote: “The Al-Jazeera channel burnishes [the image] of the militias and terrorist organizations that have waded in Arab blood, describing them as ‘Islamic resistance.’ We seem to be facing a planned and organized project to burnish the image of Iran’s agents and use the Palestinian issue as an excuse to direct accusations of heresy at anyone who exposes the proxies and agents loyal [to Iran].”

The only award Qatar is due is for encouraging Islamist terrorism and jeopardizing security and stability in the Middle East.

In 2017, Qatar and the US signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on combatting the financing of terrorism. The MoU ensures increased collaboration between US and Qatari military and intelligence forces, and even provides the ability for the U.S. Treasury Department to work closely with the Qatari Government to help monitor suspected terror-financing activities. Evidently, this agreement did not apply to Qatar’s ties with Hamas. Nor did it prevent the October 7 massacres.

Based on the data compiled from multiple English, Arabic and French sources within the Middle East, Europe and the US, a team of American and Israeli investigators concluded in April that Qatar “operates not as an independent mediator as it claims, but benefits directly from the bloodshed and geopolitical fallout and unrest that result from its policies.”

The “Doha-Gaza Alliance at all levels — financial, political, and military — has resulted in the current regional upheaval, the impact of which is being felt worldwide,” the same investigators said in a confidential report, adding that Qatari funding and policies led directly to October 7. They noted that although the US has known about Qatar’s malign activities for years, it has failed to strategically act on them. This has allowed Qatar to advance policies that are harmful to the interests of the US and its allies in the Middle East and beyond.

Instead of showering yet more money and awards on countries that seem to be plotting to bring America down, the US love-fest with Qatar and Iran should immediately be ended.

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Reade Ben, Jordan McGillis Greener on the Other Side? Despite its flaws, America remains the land of opportunity.

Posted By on August 23rd, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/comparing-the-u-s-with-europe

European vacation season isn’t over yet, and this year more Americans than ever have been flying across the Atlantic. By August’s end, they’ll be returning by the 787-full, jetlagged but jubilant, ready to regale friends with tales of their travels—and often enough, the view that the Europeans really have this quality-of-life thing figured out.

Europe’s cities, towns, and countrysides surely are pleasant places to visit. But does their appeal go further? Are they superior to America as places to live? For an evidence-based answer, the natural starting points are big-figure economic numbers such as GDP per capita and disposable incomes. On that score, America clearly comes out ahead of Europe (we’ll focus on EU countries for our purposes here). According to the World Bank, 2023 per capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power in the United States is more than one-third higher than that of the EU, at $81,695 vs. $60,350. Disposable incomes favor the U.S. as well.

Of course, while it is widely accepted that Americans are on average more productive and richer than Europeans, both America and Europe are sufficiently diverse and vast that generalizing isn’t that useful. Given that newcomers to the EU are still climbing out of the hole dug by Communism, a comparison with the richer corners of Europe is more apt. Moreover, Americans tend to work more for the money they earn. If we’re trying to puzzle out who has it better, it makes sense to adjust for the more plentiful leisure time afforded Europeans.

Last year, The Economist performed an exercise of this kind, stacking European countries up against the United States on the basis of per capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power and hours worked. The analysis found that EU countries Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, and Sweden (along with non-EU Norway and Switzerland) eclipse the U.S. in per-capita GDP when adjusting for those considerations. These countries, in a manner of speaking, have higher individual productivity than America. But if we isolate Norway’s 6 million people, Belgium’s 12 million, and the like, why not do the same for American states? That comparison tells another story.

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Hannah Arendt and the Evil of Anti-Semitism Mervyn Bendle

Posted By on August 23rd, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/05/hannah-arendt-and-the-evil-of-anti-semitism/

Incredible as it may seem, it is now no longer possible to ignore the growing parallels between the present onslaught of anti-Semitism in Australia and elsewhere in the West, and the situation of the Jewish people in Germany and Europe during the inter-war years, culminating in the Holocaust and the attempted extermination of the Jewish race. Above all, there should be no doubt that the well-organised coalition of Progressivist and Islamist forces wishes the greatest possible harm upon not only Israel but the Jewish diaspora as a whole.

This danger is especially acute in a multicultural society like Australia which has imported entrenched anti-Semitism, and where key sections of the political elite and civil society, including academia, the education system, the media and the arts have been captured by these forces, while federal and state governments are seeking to withdraw or render incapable all relevant levels of protection for Australian Jews. This deliberate anti-Semitic policy has already been implemented by the New South Wales and Victorian police forces in their refusal (presumably under political instruction) to apply the laws relating to hate-speech and anti-Semitic demonstrations, while the Australian Human Rights Commission has similarly remained deliberately inactive in the face of clear violations of human rights suffered by our Jewish citizens.

It is possible to illustrate the great dangers, especially of complacency and disbelief, that exist by focusing on the experience of Hannah Arendt, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, as she was brought from her comfortable and beloved “life of the mind” to confront the dark malignancy that came to convulse Europe during her lifetime, and that led her to write two of the most important books of the century, exploring these issues. The principal message here is that nothing can be taken for granted, there is no room for complacency, the horrific times could well return, and the most vigorous resistance to the age-old evil of anti-Semitism must be mounted.

* * *

On May 22, 1960, the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, rose to his feet in the Israeli parliament to announce that ex-SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann had been captured and would stand trial facing fifteen charges including crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people for his part in the murder of six million Jews. Eichmann had escaped the Allied authorities after the Second World War and had joined many other Nazi fugitives in South America. Eventually, he was tracked down to a suburb of Buenos Aires by Mossad agents after he became careless and began to boast. (“I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of 5 million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.”) He was kidnapped, sedated, disguised, taken to the airport, placed on an airliner and spirited away to Israel. His trial (below) ran from April 11 to August 15, 1961.

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Tweedle-Kam and Tweedle-Tim By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on August 23rd, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/tweedle_kam_and_tweedle_tim.html

There is little to differentiate the kooks setting things on fire outside the Democrats’ convention from the kooks setting rhetorical fires inside

The more I see of Tim Walz, the more I realize he’s just a fatter, whiter version of Kamala.  They both laugh at inappropriate times.  They both say weird things.  They both yearn for a communist America.  They’re both on the wrong side of the IQ bell curve.  If we lived in a society that encouraged talented people to run for political office, Tweedle-Kam and Tweedle-Tim would not be known.  Because our political system excels at promoting mediocre minds attached to lost souls, the Democrat Party gives us a babbling baboon and a cackling hyena for veep and president.

I thought Tweedle-Kam had a monopoly on obnoxious laughing, but I was wrong.  Every time a camera pans over to Tweedle-Tim, his head is thrown back in a chortling fit.  Every subject seems so funny.  Food and fuel costs are a nightmare, Tim.  Ha-ha-ha!  Foreign nationals are killing Americans on neighborhood streets.  Tee-hee-hee!  You misrepresented your military rank and service record.  Hey now, that’s not funny!  You’re right, coward.  None of it is funny at all.

It’s increasingly clear that the Tweedle-twins laugh because they have nothing significant to say.  Or, rather, anything significant they might say, they can’t admit until after the election.  As Nancy Pelosi would tell us, you have to vote the Tweedle-twins into office before you can find out how they plan to screw over America.  Nobody wants to vote for open borders and mass amnesty for foreigners.  Nobody wants to vote for more spending and inflation.  Nobody wants to vote for social credit scores and expanded government regulation.  Because the Tweedle-twins can’t say what they want, they must laugh during all the awkward silence.  It’s just weird.

But Democrats are the party of weird.  For them, moms and dads are boring.  Families are bad.  White people are evil.  And individual liberty is repulsive.  They are the party of she-hes, xirs, poly-whatevers, and subjective truths.  They don’t have time to think about sound money or global peace because they’re too busy fighting linguistic battles against hetero-cis-normativity, unconscious bias, systemic racism, and the dreaded patriarchy.

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Trump and Vance Explain How They Will Handle a ‘World on Fire’ at North Carolina Rally Trump and Vance’s speeches at Asheboro contrast Trump’s strong mastery of the global threats facing this nation and Harris’s profound national security inexperience and incompetence. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on August 23rd, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/23/trump-and-vance-explain-how-they-will-handle-a-world-on-fire-at-north-carolina-rally/

During a huge rally in Asheboro, North Carolina on Wednesday, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance gave compelling speeches on the urgency of returning to Trump’s approach to U.S. national security to reverse the Biden/Harris administration’s disastrous foreign policy.

My AFPI colleague General Keith Kellogg and I were honored to attend the Trump/Vance national security speeches. (Kellogg also delivered a solid national security speech to warm up the crowd.) The Asheboro event was the first outdoor Trump rally since last month’s assassination attempt against the former president in Butler, PA. This rally had the high-security measures that should have been in place at the Butler rally.

The Trump/Vance presentations were especially significant because Vice President Harris and her campaign refuses to explain how a Harris administration would address growing global instability. There also has been an absence of any serious discussion of national security at this week’s Democratic National Convention.

An August 22 Wall Street Journal editorial raised concerns about this, noting that “Foreign policy is where the Vice President’s unknowns are most troubling… Yet Ms. Harris hasn’t explained her security views on much of anything… She hasn’t explained to the public what her core principles are, or even who she relies on for foreign policy advice.”

Trump and Vance did not pull their punches on the dire state of global security caused by the Biden/Harris administration or hold back on their policy solutions.

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THE DEMOCRATS ARE HAVING A CONVENTION ABOUT NOTHING: PETER SAVODNIK

Posted By on August 23rd, 2024

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdb5b8531-5106-4ee6-a5bd-5f73fb8e7081_1125x245.png

The Democratic convention in Chicago has been a huge success, I suppose. The party has rallied around Kamala Harris and “Coach Walz,” rebranded her as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, and connected the campaign with Barack Obama’s inspiring 2008 race for the White House.

On top of that, the anti-American, antisemitic flag-burners who promised to turn this city upside down haven’t materialized en masse. The hoped-for 1968 redux is more like a sad, echoing whimper. 

In other words: The vibes have been spectacular!

And yet.

It’s unclear what these people are peddling.

Certainly not Harris’s proposal to cap the cost of groceries. The only speaker at the convention who has bothered to talk that up has been Bernie Sanders. Everyone else drones on about Harris being a dog lover and a fighter and, most importantly, Momala.

While (rightly) pummeling the GOP–Donald Trump cult of personality, Democrats have mythologized Harris and turned her into an alternate-Harris who would have been unrecognizable to Harris herself just a few weeks ago: tough, caring, super-smart, results-oriented. Hillary Clinton 2.0.

But no one has ventured to say what this alternate-Harris would do in office. Or, more broadly, what her party wants to accomplish over the next four years. There is no program. 

To be fair, the Republican agenda is a mosh pit of confusions—a free-market, tariff-laden, stick-it-to-the-establishment, fuck-China, go-America mélange of half-baked, sort-of proposals.

But the idea behind that confusion is straightforward. It is America first. Americans first. And every bill, initiative, executive decision can be, should be, viewed through that lens. Whether that amounts to a coherent theory of government remains to be seen. (The Republicans seem to be trying to figure out in real time the how behind the what.) But there is a focal point.

No one says what the Democrats’ North Star is. They have wielded enormous power for most of the past two decades, and they insist they won’t “turn back,” but no one says where we’re going. Or what they want beyond the blandest of platitudes about “freedom” and “choice” and “identity.”

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Asian Representation at MIT Increases after Supreme Court Ruling Ending Affirmative Action By David Zimmermann

Posted By on August 23rd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/asian-representation-at-mit-increases-after-supreme-court-ruling-ending-affirmative-action/

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has seen a significant increase in Asian-American representation in its first freshman class to be admitted since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in the admissions process at U.S. colleges and universities last summer.

Asian-American students make up 47 percent of the incoming freshman class, according to the new admissions data that MIT announced on Wednesday. This is up from 40 percent the prior year.

The data is consistent with the evidence that Students for Fair Admissions brought in its two lawsuits against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina: that subjective admissions criteria were used to disadvantage Asian students who performed disproportionately well on standardized tests such as the SAT, while black and Hispanic students, who scored lower on such tests on average, were given an admissions boost. As a result of the landmark ruling, it’s expected black enrollment will decrease while Asian enrollment will increase. MIT came to the same conclusion.

“We expected that this would result in fewer students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups enrolling at MIT,” Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill told campus publication MIT News. “That’s what has happened.”

The percentage of black students enrolled at the university dropped from 15 percent last year to 5 percent, and the percentage of Hispanic students dropped from 16 percent to 11 percent. White students stayed roughly the same — 37 percent compared to 38 percent last year.

The university notes these figures do not include international citizens, nor does the total add up to 100 percent as students may identify as more than one race or ethnicity.

MIT is the first major university to publish data on the composition of its first-year class since the Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2023.

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Harris’s Collection of Clichés

Posted By on August 23rd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/08/harriss-collection-of-cliches/

Without a teleprompter in this campaign, she’d be rendered practically mute.

Kamala Harris competently delivered a convention address that capped what has been an extraordinary run for her over the last month.

Since her ascension as the Democratic nominee, of course, the path has been greased for her. The sheer relief among Democrats that their fate is no longer tethered to that of Joe Biden and boosterish media coverage have transformed the race, with Harris narrowly ahead in most national polls whereas Biden was falling increasingly behind prior to his defenestration.

Harris wants to portray herself as a fresh, new force who is not Donald Trump or Joe Biden; this may be her greatest political advantage, and it was a major theme of her speech.

She represents, she assured us, a New Way Forward, as the nation “has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past.” Whether she succeeds in making this argument will have much to do with the outcome in November. There is no doubt that Trump’s shtick is getting long in the tooth, and he’s trying to run as the outsider who was president less than four years ago. But, rather than an agent of change, Harris is a representative of a Biden administration status quo that a majority of Americans consider with dismay.

To the extent that Harris is differentiating herself from Biden, it is by moving to his left, although she didn’t put the accent on that in her speech. Instead, it was a paint-by-numbers collection of clichés. She’s from and for the middle class. She’ll be a president for all Americans. She’ll fight for this country. Anything is possible in America.

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DNC protest ends with arrests after demonstrators refuse to disperse The protest assembled at the Israeli Consulate in downtown Chicago quickly grew unruly, and protesters clashed with police.

Posted By on August 23rd, 2024

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/dnc-protest-ends-arrests-demonstrators-refuse-disperse-rcna167487

CHICAGO — Protests on the second night of the Democratic National Convention ended in arrests after a pro-Palestinian group led several hundred demonstrators on an improvised path through the streets of downtown Chicago after police tried to block them.

Tuesday night’s protest was organized by Behind Enemy Lines, a leftist group with militant leanings. Another group behind the protest was Samidoun, which Germany and Israel have banned over allegations that it has ties to terrorist groups. (The U.S. has not declared Samidoun a terrorist group.)

“Dozens of people were brutally arrested outside the Israeli consulate by Brandon Johnson’s thugs defending the genocidal criminals inside the DNC,” Behind Enemy Lines said on Instagram late Tuesday, referring to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. The Chicago Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the number of arrests.

Police Superintendent Larry Snelling praised his officers for “showing restraint when no one else did,” saying they “did an excellent job responding to violence and vandalism.”

Some groups had come to the city with “hostility,” and “that’s exactly what we saw tonight,” he told reporters. “People got too close to officers.”