UNRWA’s Jihad against Israel (Part Two) by Andrew Harrod

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/08/unrwas-jihad-against-israel-part-two

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East or “UNRWA was nurtured from its beginnings to avoid any permanent solution to the plight of the refugees” from Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. So documented Center for Near East Policy Research (CNEPR) Director David Bedein in his previously discussed insightful 2014 book Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict—UNRWA Policies Reconsidered.

As Bedein explained, UNRWA has caused the 1948 “Arab refugee crisis to persist longer than any other refugee situation in the world.” This longevity results from UNRWA’s definition of Palestinian refugees as including not just those who lost their homes in what became Israel in 1948-1949 but also their multigenerational descendants. Simultaneously, UNRWA has insisted that this community may only end its refugee status through a “right of return” to what is now modern Israel.

Contrary to UNRWA, Bedein observed, the “1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees makes no mention of descendants.” This convention also “exempts from refugee status a person who ‘has acquired a new nationality,’” he added. While such acquisition of new citizenship usually ends refugee status, UNRWA’s refugee “definition makes no mention of newly acquired nationality.

Meanwhile a Palestinian right of return “has no legal precedence in history and, indeed, has not been applied in other cases of wartime refugees throughout the twentieth century, which witnessed a record number of such refugees,” Bedein noted. Proponents of this claimed right often wrongly invoke the December 11, 1948, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194. Yet at this time, UN officials “were concerned that an international guarantee of the ‘right of return’ for refugees could be applied by the millions of Germans” who lost their homes in Eastern Europe following World War II.

Feds Lower Expectations for January 6 Probe It’s clear the Justice Department won’t be able to prove its case; last week’s revelation is just the start of walking back their tough talk. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/23/feds-lower-expectations-for-january-6-probe/

The FBI continues to hunt down Americans even for minor involvement in the breach of the Capitol on January 6. Four Ohio residents were arrested last week and charged with common misdemeanors. It appears the group was inside the building for about 15 minutes and committed no violent crimes.

It’s the latest example of the absurdity of the Capitol breach probe; rather than pursue the handful of violent offenders, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is rounding up alleged trespassers. And it would be laughable if this eight-month manhunt to punish Trump supporters wasn’t destroying lives and tearing families apart in the process.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the insurrection gulag; the overwhelming number of cases consist only of low-level offenses. That is not what Michael Sherwin, the head prosecutor handling the first few months of the Capitol breach probe, promised one week after the protest. “The initial charges we’re filing, these misdemeanors, these are only the beginning,” Sherwin said at a January 12 press conference. “We’re looking at serious felony cases tied to sedition and conspiracy.”

Yet, in spite of Twitter’s best efforts, no one so far has been charged with insurrection or sedition; the best the government can do is file hard-to-prove charges of obstruction of an official proceeding or conspiracy, both felonies.

The Justice Department set expectations extremely high early on. Revenge against Americans who dared to protest the election of Joe Biden would come fast and fierce, the public was assured. Attorney General Merrick Garland promised the investigation into January 6, which he compares to the Oklahoma City bombing, would be his top priority. And when FBI Director Chris Wray designated January 6 an act of “domestic terrorism,” Trump haters smelled blood in the water.

No Evidence of Serious Plans

The Justice Department now seems to be prepping the ground for a major letdown. “The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result,” Reuters reported August 20. Nearly all of the cases, four former and current law enforcement officials said, are “one-offs” while roughly five percent are associated with so-called militia groups.

“FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside,” the unnamed sources told Reuters.

Warlord Diplomacy: Now the Real Struggle Begins: Scott Kelly

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/08/warlord-diplomacy-now-the-real-struggle-begins/

Kabul has fallen to the Taliban in spectacular fashion, with the group’s fighters streaming across the country seemingly unopposed and walking into the capital city to declare victory. The speed of their advance shocked all but the most cynical analysts. President Biden has stubbornly stuck to his decision to end America’s participation in the Afghan conflict as one former national security official after another has come out in opposition, saying America needs to stick it out as long as it takes. Whether some of them are more interested in helping the Afghans or protecting their own legacies is an open question.

With President Ghani fleeing the country moments before Kabul fell, hordes of civilians swamping Karzai International Airport to try and get on the last flight out of town, and China, Russia, and Pakistan moving in to claim their share of the spoils, it might seem like Afghanistan’s more than four decades of perpetual war are finally over. Coverage in Western media widely paints the picture that the Taliban have won, all of America’s and her allies’ efforts were in vain, and all that is left to do is point fingers while we watch the Taliban reassert their brutal form of theocratic tyranny on a powerless population.

But having possession of Kabul, and ruling Afghanistan are not the same thing, as history has shown invaders and would-be kings, from Alexander the Great to the British and the Iron Amir alike.

The Military Victory that Wasn’t

The most surprising part of the Taliban’s takeover was how little fighting it took to accomplish. Even traditional strongholds of anti-Taliban sentiment, such as Mazar-i Sharif, and famed warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum’s home province of Jowzjan, fell almost without a shot being fired, with local officials either fleeing or publicly handing control over their districts to the Taliban. The Afghan military was well trained and equipped, with modern weapons and an effective, if fledging, air force that could have coordinated to stop the Taliban’s advance at numerous points but failed to do so. Even if only half of the 350,000 soldiers America was paying to train and employ on paper actually existed in practice, it was a force still more than enough to keep 75,000 Taliban fighters at bay.  Afghanistan’s traditional militias, after openly reforming and rearming in anticipation of America’s withdrawal also chose not to fight. In the final telling, the Taliban’s successful conquest of Afghanistan and seizure of the capital was not a great military victory. It was a political one.

Turkey: How the Sultan’s Ivy League School Axed a Professor by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17613/turkey-amir-hetsroni

Turkey, with a population of 83 million and two Nobel Prizes, ranks 62nd on the list of countries by Nobel laureates per capita. This score is worse than that of the Azerbaijan, Algeria, Yemen, Ghana, Bulgaria, Guatemala, Morocco, the Palestinian territories and Iraq.

Although [Professor Amir] Hetsroni just agreed to a new three-year contract a month ago, Koç University dismissed him in June for “conduct unbecoming to a member of Koç University faculty,” according to his termination notice. The reasons the university administration set out — including “inappropriate behaviour” — are vague, except for an accusation that he caused “significant damage to his faculty apartment by leaving its windows open.”

“I was fired on the spot without any advance warning for voicing criticism of Turkey and the university in private Whatsapp conversations that were leaked by a third party to the university management…. Obviously, my criticism of Turkey has nothing to do with my teaching level, research output, or service quality. If this is enough to get fired today in Turkey, I don’t even want to think about the fate of a professor who would dare say these things in class.” — Amir Hetsroni, newsaboutturkey.com., June 22, 2021.

Turkey is always fun unless one has to live there. Academia, for instance, is shockingly becoming solely “his master’s voice.”

There are more than 200 universities in Turkey, most of which are run by the state. There are, however, only 10 Turkish universities featured in the World University Rankings 2019, a list of top 1,018 institutions, according to Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), the world’s leading provider of services, analytics and insight to the higher education sector.

Turkey, with a population of 83 million and two Nobel Prizes, ranks 62nd on the list of countries by Nobel laureates per capita. This score is worse than that of the Azerbaijan, Algeria, Yemen, Ghana, Bulgaria, Guatemala, Morocco, the Palestinian territories and Iraq.

Who Is Directing American Policy? by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17676/who-is-directing-american-policy

Biden was repeatedly told by military brass and intelligence officials that this was going to be the nightmare scenario if he unilaterally pulled American forces out at the end of this month.

How could he do this? For those who follow the grifters, pilot fish, and “consultants” who wallow behind the wake of this administration it should come as no surprise.

“All our efforts in Afghan have be uprooted by a complete disaster of an administration…. you can spin it all you want…. We Afghan/Iraq vets did not lose this…. our government did… our government lost it for us… but while most of America was at the mall, we were all in the mix shedding our time, effort and blood…. What broke me was the video of the mother throwing her newborn to the Marines on the wall…. but this is all squarely on who’s in office now…. even if he doesn’t know it.” — EMT worker on 9/11/2001 and later a US Marine.

That final observation from an individual I am proud to know reveals what many of us wonder. This president is making terribly flawed decisions for which history and the American people will hold him accountable. And if it is not Biden directing American domestic and foreign policy, then who is?

The images of our desperate Afghan allies begging for rescue as their nation falls into the darkness of the Taliban will become permanently etched in the legacy of the Biden Administration. So too will infants being handed by frantic parents into the arms of U.S. Marines, more than 800 people jammed into a departing C-17 cargo plane, and Taliban beating and whipping those seeking access to the Kabul airport.

Yet the Biden administration was repeatedly told by military brass and intelligence officials that this was going to be the nightmare scenario if they unilaterally pulled American forces out at the end of this month. President Joe Biden’s order that created heart-rending havoc ignored all professional advice, insight, and guidance. His Kabul chaos has made the disorderly evacuation of Dunkirk during World War II look like an act of military precision.

Video: Freedom Protests in Cuba and in the U.S. And the leftist lies about them. John Stossel

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/freedom-protests-cuba-and-us-john-stossel/

John Stossel exposes the truth about the lies and propaganda being told by progressives, BLM and the mainstream media about massive freedom protests by Cubans who have rallying against oppression and suffering under Communism.

Where are the Feminists? While the Taliban barbarically repress women in Afghanistan, toxic feminists wage a war against American men. Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/where-are-feminists-jason-d-hill/

Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Bruce Bawer’s excellent Frontpage article “Where Are the Gays?” paints a chilling portrait of the imminent torture, execution and amputations that await gay men under Taliban rulership in Afghanistan. And, of course, western gays are silent. Many are too busy hooking up on multiple sex apps. Many have never been concerned with rights that extend beyond the erogenous zones of their genitalia, and several are too busy celebrating the pedophilia presented in the best-selling young adult pornographic novel, Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts), as a moral victory over heteronormative patriarchy.

The majority of sex-addicted gay men live in a curated silo where drugs, hook-ups, flaunting open relationships, and chasing youth and beauty supersede condemning the horrific agenda of the Taliban — an agenda that will no doubt transport Afghanistan back to the Dark Ages.

A reader suggested that a better article would be named: “Where Are All The Feminists?” Given the plight of women under the Taliban when they ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001, feminists should be concerned about the repression of the rights of individual women in that country. This concern should extend to the current resurgence of child marriage of young teenage girls to Taliban soldiers.

No, feminists in America will not be criticizing the Taliban, just as neither they nor gays in America have dared criticize the brutal treatment of women and gays under the governance of Hamas in Gaza. Feminists in this country are too consumed with another task: the destruction of the American male, who is seen as the producer of imperialism, “racist capitalism,” and systemic racial and gender oppression. This is their obsession. The destruction of the American male supersedes moral concern for the wanton annihilation of human lives in other countries. They will not speak out against the Taliban because they hate America and American men more than they care about the rights of any individual singled out as a target for discrimination based on membership in a demonized group.  

As we hurtle towards a possible post-American future, this new breed of feminists, a phalanx of zealots, has forged fourth-wave feminism, and it’s far more rabidly anti-male than previous iterations of the ideological movement. You’d think because of its petty maliciousness and deranged radicalism, its appeal would be narrowly limited to the faculty lounges of liberal arts colleges. Yet since the inception of the #MeToo movement, the crazed foot soldiers of fourth-wave feminism managed not only to take their worldview mainstream, but also to put a headlock on the commanding heights of American culture. This is as impressive as it is terrifying.

These new man-haters are seething with toxic feminism, and the further spread of their noxious sentiment could likely spell the death of our country as we know it. Increasingly prevalent is their practice of exploiting female agency and identity to make blanket attacks on men, to neuter manliness, and to advocate for the end of masculinity. These goals are being achieved while simultaneously promulgating the dual concepts that men are by nature nefarious and that female advancement can only come through the wholesale annihilation of heteronormative constructs of maleness. The destructive consequences for relationships at every level of society—from the simple couple to the community to the nation—will be vast and irreparable.

Director of the National Institutes of health grossly misstates the science on vaccination vs. natural immunity By Michael Nadler

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/director_of_the_national_institutes_of_health_grossly_misstates_the_science_on_vaccination_vs_natural_immunity.html

“A sad state of affairs when you can’t trust the data from the top public health official in the United States.”

On the August 12, 2021 Special Report, Bret Baier asked NIH Director Francis Collins: “Can you definitely say to somebody that the vaccine provides better protection than the antibodies you get from actually having had COVID-19?”

Dr Collins replied to Bret and the almost 2 million viewers of Special Report:

“Yes, Bret, I can say that.  There was a study published by CDC just ten days ago in Kentucky, and they looked specifically at people who had had natural infection and people who had been vaccinated and then ended up getting infection again.  So what was the protection level?  It was more than two-fold better for the people who had had the vaccine in terms of protection than people who had had natural infection.  That’s very clear in that Kentucky study.  You know that surprises people.  Kind of surprised me that the vaccine would actually be better than natural infection.  But if you think about it, it kinda makes sense…That’s a settled issue.”

Teaching Critical Race Theory By Brandi Levine

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/teaching_critical_race_theory.html

As irate parents and taxpayers turn up in large numbers at school board meetings across the nation to express their opposition to Critical Race Theory (CRT), school districts are backpedaling as fast as they can, claiming “we don’t teach Critical Race Theory in our district.”  Although districts are not teaching classes titled “Critical Race Theory,” they are incorporating CRT ideology into programming and curricula, and hiring people whose job is to insert CRT into every aspect of school life.

The following is one example of how CRT principles and practices are being supported by Pennsylvania’s Downingtown Area School District (DASD), where earlier this year the board hired Director of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI), Jason Brown, who wrote a book, Ugh! Not Another Diversity Book in which he misrepresents the history of Thanksgiving to portray all early European immigrants as bad. Please note, the disparagement of people based on their skin color (white), and ethnic background (European), is a key aspect of CRT ideology.

At DASD public meetings, the Board does not allow community members to make comments about DASD employees. Speakers are silenced when they attempt to provide personal experiences and observations of how CRT ideology is being implemented — as was this woman and this woman — making it very difficult to reveal the CRT/DEI agenda. Therefore, it is vital for DASD residents to communicate beyond the bounds of school board meetings to the broader public. 

In Ugh! Not Another Diversity Book Brown plays fast and loose with history to promote an anti-white narrative about the origins of Thanksgiving. To elucidate both what Brown is doing and what the DASD Board considers acceptable scholarship for a member of the “Senior Leadership Team,” it is helpful to look first at the historical record. The passage below is one of the only two existing firsthand accounts of the first Thanksgiving in America, written in 1621 by Edward Winslow.

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others.  And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty. We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us…

The Taliban Haven’t Changed By Isaac Schorr & Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-taliban-havent-changed/

“The Taliban haven’t changed. The West’s sense of moral clarity about their wickedness and confidence in its ability to defeat them has.”

For the first time in nearly two decades, the Taliban control most of Afghanistan, including the capital city of Kabul.

As the self-destruction of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan continues apace and the Biden administration haphazardly races to evacuate U.S. citizens and allies from the war-torn country ahead of its self-imposed deadline of August 31, an odd line is emerging: Maybe the Taliban aren’t so bad.

Experts such as Mustapha Ben Messaoud, the chief of field operations at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), claim to be “optimistic” about the Taliban’s return to power, citing “ongoing discussions.” Reuters reported that officials at UNICEF have “cited some Taliban local representatives as saying they were waiting for guidance from their leaders on the issue of educating girls, while others have said they want schools ‘up and running.’” A spokesman for U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michele Bachelet at least had the decency to acknowledge that the concerns of Afghans were “thoroughly understandable,” in what nevertheless may qualify as the understatement of the century.

The president of the United States and his team have also hypothesized that the Taliban may turn over a new leaf. In an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos last Wednesday, Biden responded to a question about whether the Taliban had changed:

“No. I think — let me put it this way. I think they’re going through sort of an existential crisis about do they want to be recognized by the international community as being a legitimate government,” he said.

The claim that the Taliban were facing an existential crisis echoed White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s assertion from earlier this month that “the Taliban also has to make an assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community.”

It appears that they have made that assessment already.